LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

Tarian whispered as his leg was about to leave the earth, and Elias and the rest heard him, "You are not the only one with a Lumina Construct."

His body began to rise. It was so small at first that Elias thought he had imagined it. Tarian rose by an inch, then by a hand's-breadth, then by a foot, drifting up off the stone like a leaf drifts up off the ground when the air beneath it changes.

His arms spread, and then his head tilted back. Tarian's eyes, when they opened, were no longer pale gold; they were the color of lightning before it leaves the cloud, white and blue at the same time, a color that should not exist in a human face.

A spine-chilling sound emerged from his body as the first wound opened on his cheekbone.

It was a thin line that reached the bone, but the blood did not fall downward but upward, rising into the air, drawn into the gathering dark above as if a thread were being pulled out of him by an invisible hand.

Elias was reminded of what happened to him as he forged his flesh, but this one was different; it was as if Tarian was offering himself to the mounting storm.

A second wound opened on his forearm. A third, at the hollow of his throat. A fourth across his chest, splitting his armor as if it were made from dried leaf.

The blood that was now furiously pouring from his body lifted and rose and was pulled into the dark, and the dark drank it, and a growing wind shrieked as if it wanted more of this blood.

"Oh," Elara said. "Oh, no."

Despite undergoing incredible pain, the prince did not scream, and he did not even speak; his eyes were looking above where the cloud he had been calling reached its threshold somewhere far above them, in the sky none of them could see, and with a resounding boom that was heard across the city, the threshold gave.

The first bolt of lightning came down so close to the rim of the pit that the air inside the pit compressed and slapped against Elias's helm with a sound like a falling building, and the second came a fraction of a second later, on the other side of the rim.

There was silence for a moment before the third struck somewhere inside the temple, and the thunder was like a single physical blow against the chest that made every one of them stagger.

This was pure power of the sort never meant for the hands of men. Their shock, however, did not matter as the rest came anyway.

Lightning began to fall in pillars. Each of them was a pillar of white light, a foot thick and a thousand feet long, and they fell so close together and so fast that the gaps between them disappeared, and what the candidates saw, when they could see anything, was a forest of light reaching from the cloud they could not see to the floor of the temple they could.

It was hard to imagine or describe the sound as the heavens themselves seemed to be collapsing.

The entire temple lit up, revealing it was much vaster than they could see in the dim light, and the spawns looked up, millions of red eyes shining like tiny torches from the depths of the maw.

They opened their mouths in silent screams as the lightning struck the sea of bodies and every where the pillar struck, the bodies of the spawns simply stopped existing in a column the width of the strike, and what was left was a perfectly cylindrical hole through three hundred feet of stacked bodies, and at the bottom of the hole was a glassed circle of stone that had been temple floor.

Then the lightning moved, the next strike was a foot away, then another, then a hundred at once.

The shockwaves from all these detonations brought a wave of power that pushed against Elias, and even inside his stone skin, he could smell the ozone in the air, and underneath that smell was the faint animal stench of fear from a million bodies that had felt, for the smallest fraction of an instant, what was coming for them.

Theron gagged. Elara turned her face into her own shoulder. Even Sera, who had walked through ash for four hours, took a half-step back, and Kaelen shuddered.

However, for them, the sound was worse as each individual bolt was a thunderclap, and there were hundreds of them every second.

With so much descending lightning, the thunder came in a sustained wall of pressure that hit the eardrum and stayed there, and the candidates discovered that the wall was not just sound. It was the air being pushed out of every place lightning was occupying, and the air had to go somewhere, and the somewhere it went was through them.

The candidates here began to bleed through their eyes and nose, and they struggled to bring up their essence to defend against the growing pressure in the air.

Elias's helm rang like a struck bell, and inside his head, the Passenger laughed, and for the first time in hours, the laughter sounded like awe.

A single voice, distorted, half-eaten by the storm, came from above.

"GO," Tarian said.

He was twelve feet above the outcrop, suspended in nothing, his feet pointed at the floor of the temple, his arms wide. The blood that had been a thread was now a river. It rose from a hundred small wounds opened across his body.

The blood was still going straight up, spiraling, twisting, and where it entered the dark above the rim it lit, briefly, a color that Elias had no word for, before it became part of the cloud and the cloud answered with a fresh column of light.

"GO," he said again, and this time the word was riding the thunder, and the thunder carried it. "I CANNOT. HOLD. LONG."

Elias did not waste the breath of a question. He had counted the path the moment Tarian had named it; he could see it now, written in the floor of the temple as a corridor of glass forty feet wide, running from the wall directly below their outcrop to the eastern columns where the mountain of flesh had not yet swallowed the architecture.

The corridor made by the lightning was not still, as the spawns kept filling it from all sides, and were dying as they tried. Despite the fact that perhaps hundreds of thousands had died in a few seconds, with their numbers, they would succeed in time.

"With me," Elias said, and dropped the full twenty feet to the ground, and he landed in the corridor on the glassed stone of the temple floor, and his stone boots cracked the still-cooling glass.

The others came down behind him, and they began to move through the slim corridor created by lightning, and all around them were millions of bodies, straining to cut through the lightning and tear them apart.

Any normal Siphon would have gone insane at this point due to the excessive simulations all around them, but no one here was normal, and if they were going to fall apart, it would have to be after they leave this place.