The temple deep in the earth seemed to be older than the city above it, almost as if the city of Stormfall was built above it, and now that Elias was running across the cooling glass that the lightning had left, he began to understand for the first time what that meant.
Perhaps the others here with him may not have noticed, but the columns they were passing by were memorials.
Each one carried a figure with wings spread and hands raised, and the faces of the figures had been scoured smooth by something that was not weather, because there had been no weather here for a long time.
Whatever had scoured them had been the long, slow exhalation of time, or perhaps there was something else happening here, Elias did not know.
All of these thoughts briefly passed through his mind before it was pushed aside, and he focused on the mountain of flesh in front.
It was almost four hundred feet high, its thousand mouths were open, and its thousand eyes were watching.
A thousand feet of bodies lay between Elias and the mountain, and Elias did not count how many bodies that was, but it would not matter.
"On me," he said, and the four behind him did not hesitate, and they followed him, which was a good thing because if they were not united at this moment, their end would be swift and brutal.
The spider-legs Lumina Construct were already at full extension, all six of them, blood-iron gleaming red and gold in the dim light of the chamber.
They burned essence the way a furnace burned coal, and without the constant feeding of the ash, he would not be able to maintain them for long, but he did not expect that to be a problem anytime soon.
With the end of the lightning storm, the first wave of spawns came at them along the temple floor, climbing over the fields of their own bodies, and Elias understood within the first three seconds that these were not the spawns he had been killing on the surface.
These had been the closest to the source. They had been fed the longest. Their bodies were leaner, and their limbs were proportioned for speed instead of mass, and where the surface spawns had come at him in the panicked tide of a thing that had only ever been built to die, these came in formations.
What they had been killing above were the newborns who were barely less than beasts, but these ones moved like soldiers.
Three abreast. Then five. Then nine. They moved in the staggered pattern like soldiers, and he adjusted before the formation reached him.
The first spider-leg stabbed down on the center of the leading rank in a spike that punched through three spawns at once and held them there, pinned to the glass, while the second leg arced behind it and took the second rank in a horizontal harvest.
The third leg met the third rank from the side, sweeping low. The fourth came down from above on the back rank. By the time the fifth and sixth had moved, there was no formation; there was only ash.
But there had been twenty-seven of them, and the next formation was already coming, and behind it another, and behind it another.
"Wedge," Sera said, her voice was sharp and low and still perfectly calm. "Elias point, use your Lumina Construct and tear a path. Theron heavy left, Kaelen heavy right. I will take the back. Elara, I know you can fly. We need you above."
Theron grunted. He had not had time to be witty, and the absence of his usual chatter told Elias more about his estimate of the situation than any tactical observation would have.
Kaelen said nothing. He flexed his fingers on the haft of his hammer and shifted three feet to the right, and his palm came down flat against the glass, and the glass beneath him did not feel like glass anymore. It felt like an extension of him.
Elias did not know what Kaelen was, exactly, but he was beginning to suspect.
Elara stepped into the air. Her feet left the glass and did not return to it, and the light around her bent in a way that was no longer a sphere but a slow, deliberate spiral that lifted her three feet, then six, then ten, and from this elevation she could see the wedges of spawns coming at them from angles the others on the ground could not yet see.
Her left hand left a faint trail of frost in the air. Her right hand was empty.
"Move," she said, and her voice came down with an authority far larger than her small body could appear to carry. "Forty-five degrees. Three formations. Theron, the left one will reach you first by half a second."
Ⓔ
For the first hundred feet, they were beautiful.
The kind of beautiful that Elias had only seen in the stories he had read as a child when stories still meant something. The five of them moved through the wedges of spawns the way water moved through a system of pipes, each turn a turn that had been calculated three steps in advance by Elara above them.
Each cut made by a blade was a cut that had been set up by Sera's blade two seconds before, each impact absorbed by Kaelen's stone or redirected by Theron's reach.
Elias stood at the center of it. He did not need to lead. The wedge had organized itself around him, treating him as an axis, and the spider-legs moved with the rhythm of his breathing, and his breathing… was steady.
For the first hundred feet, the spawns were dying in their hundreds.
A wave of forty came at his front. The spider-legs took twenty-seven. Sera's blade extended past his right shoulder in a long, narrow ribbon and took eleven. Theron caught one by the throat and threw it into the column they had just passed; the column was older than the city, but Theron's throw embedded the spawn into the carved stone up to its waist, and the spawn did not finish dying for several seconds, twitching against the carvings of winged figures whose faces could no longer be seen.
Before the spawn turned to ash, the fluid from its body ran down the faceless faces of these carvings like tears.
The last one, Elara, redirected with a flick of her wrist, and the spawn's claws closed on empty air, and Kaelen took it from the side with his hammer.
Vein Completion (Crimson Vein): 47.81% → 48.40%
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