Meris, surprisingly… did not shut up.
"Shut up, he says. As if shutting up were the issue. As if our armored friend has not been bathing in ash and silence for four hours, and could not use a song or two to change the atmosphere. I am providing a service, and if there is any reason I survive this day, then it may be because of this."
"You are providing a distraction." The man huffed in irritation.
"That is what service sounds like when you are not used to it." Merris fired back.
The big man made a sound that might have been a laugh. It was possible that he had not laughed for a while and had forgotten how, because the sound came out like a cough.
Or maybe he was so upset he did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Elias, walking between them, did not react. He did not reward the humor, nor did he punish it. He just did not care much for it anyway, as it was not important to him.
His Vein Completion was ticking upward in increments he had stopped tracking in favor of watching the pit.
The pit was sixty meters away now, and the column of bodies still erupting from it had not narrowed further in the last two minutes, but then, as if a switch had been turned off, the new spawns coming up from the depths were no longer dispersing across the district… they were returning.
The wave of bodies pressing from the front had thinned, as these creatures were now staying near the mouth of the pit instead of rushing towards the candidates.
Elias understood what he was seeing a moment before anyone else did, and he stopped walking. The enemy had lost its advantage, and now it was going on the defensive.
The candidates around him stopped with him, and there was a look of bewilderment on their faces as they had not lost anyone in the past few moments, and the momentum of victory was beginning to appear to be clear.
"What is it?" Meris asked. For the first time, she was not joking.
Elias did not answer her, but the answer was visible fifty meters ahead, where the spawns that had been pressing against his constructs for hours were turning, climbing over each other, and pouring back toward the pit they had emerged from.
They went in dense streams, bodies climbing over bodies, the smaller ones squeezing between the larger ones, and the column erupting from the pit became a column flowing both ways at once, outward and downward in a continuous braid. Within thirty seconds, the number of spawns outside the pit had dropped by half. Within a minute, by three-quarters. Within two minutes, there were perhaps a thousand left on the cobblestones, and they too were moving toward the pit with the same eerie movements that were equally violent and yet extremely quiet.
The district went quiet as the sound of combat and the screams of the dying that had been going on for hours simply ended unexpectedly.
Meris lowered her spear slowly.
"What," she said, "is that?"
"The door to hell fucking closing," the big man muttered, relief in his eyes, "It is over…right?"
Elias spoke for the first time. His voice, coming from beneath the helm, was low and stone-flat and a little rough from hours of not being used.
"No, it is not over." Inside him, he spoke, "I am still not full."
He started walking again, and some of the candidates followed.
Ⓔ
They neared the pit almost in near silence, from afar, the ground around its rim appeared to be melted and reformed into the smooth scar tissue, but up close, it was worse.
The rim was not stone, but flesh, layered, slightly warm and moist, almost as if muscles from a body had been stripped and made into blocks.
With the foul smell coming from the pit, and without the bodies of the creature blocking it, this deep hole resembled a wide-open mouth that had all of its teeth pulled out of it so it could be stretched wider.
The walls of the pit were lined with a yellow, mucus-like substance, and it was almost like looking down a diseased throat.
It descended at an angle and curved out of sight within forty meters, and from somewhere beyond the curve there was a faint red glow, and a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature, and a smell that Elias recognized because it lived in his own chest.
It smelled of void.
This smell was not a physical thing, but something that his body had come to recognize, as it reminded him of the hole inside him also.
If the growth of his void legacy was any indicator, this was the final evidence he needed… These creatures he was fighting were part of the void like him.
Were they always here, and his presence had awakened them, or was this just more of the test the commander had created for him?
Beyond the multitude he had killed, he could also sense something deep inside this pit that resonated with him, and more than anything, he wanted to claim it.
His legacy was pulsing at a core with a hunger that he had not known before, and Elias had to hold himself back from leaping into the hole.
The candidates, about a hundred of them, gathered behind him, at a loose half-circle, with weapons ready, eyes on the throat of the pit.
No one spoke for a long moment, then Tarian stepped through the crowd.
Elias had read about the prince of Stormfall, and he did not know what to truly expect from this man.
He walked with his broken blade held down at his side, and in the same way that he had learned to tell danger, his instincts were telling him that this man was capable of killing him… and Elias found this to be very interesting.
He stopped at Elias's left, two paces back, which was not the position of a challenger, and Elias had not expected this… it would seem that this prince was not just a brute.
"You are going in," Tarian said.
"Yes."
"Alone?"
Elias looked at the throat of the pit, the spider-legs behind him rotated slowly, before they slowly vanished. He had been able to keep them active due to the fact that he was consuming so much vitality via the ash, but without constantly killing, he could not hold them up for long.
"No," he said.
Elias did not know what was waiting for him down there, and like it or not, he was not above using cannon fodder.
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