Elias did not look at the number, and ahead of him, through the field of bodies, the mountain of flesh growled through a thousand mouths, and it was like a shift in the pressure of the chamber.
This sound rippled through the spawns rushing towards the candidates, and the formation of the spawns changed, and the next wave that descended on them took the form of a column.
Twelve spawns came at the wedge in a single file, packed tight.
The lead spawn split the air with a shriek, and the shriek was not the silent shriek of the surface-spawns. It was a real sound, and it cut through the listening silence of the temple like a blade through flesh, and Elias felt his eardrums register it the way they had registered the storm that came before from Tarian.
Theron staggered. The shriek caught him at a particular pitch, and his beast-speaker hearing, which had been honed for the small voices in the dirt, was not built for sounds that came from the throats of things that could not be defined by common sense.
He went to one knee, blood running from his left ear, and he caught himself on the stump of a broken column.
Elias cursed internally with irritation as the spider-leg that had been about to take the front of the column-formation jerked away from the spawn it was about to kill to take the spawn that was diving at Theron.
The spider-leg saved Theron, but it cost them the formation.
Three of the spawns from the column got past the spider-legs in the half-second the leg had spent saving Theron, and they reached the wedge.
What followed was very fast.
The first spawn ducked under Sera's blade, came up inside her guard, and bit. Sera's pauldron took the bite, but the pauldron failed.
Three of the spawn's teeth snapped off inside her shoulder, and the spawn drew back with the shape of her shoulder still in its mouth before Sera's elbow caught its temple and crushed it into the glass.
The second spawn went for Kaelen, and his hammer came up, causing the spawn to redirect itself mid-leap.
It twisted in the air, and its claw raked across the back of his hand. The hammer did not fall, but the skin from the back of Kaelen's hand to his elbow opened in three parallel lines, and the blood came fast and bright.
Kaelen's free hand slammed down onto the cut, and the blood stopped flowing because the skin closed over it the way wet clay closed over a thumbprint.
The third spawn went for Elara. It had watched her step into the air, it had registered that she was not on the floor, and it had jumped. It rose twelve feet in a single bound, and it reached her, and its claws closed on her hip.
Elara screamed in pain as the light around her exploded. The spawn on her hip ceased to exist as the light that had been folded around her for the entire descent unfolded all at once in a sphere that radiated outward from her body.
The sphere turned every spawn within thirty feet into a thing that the eye could no longer focus on, and the things that the eye could no longer focus on stopped being things at all. Hundreds of spawns vanished, and she fell from the air.
Whatever she had unleashed had cost her, and she did not have the reserve to fold the light again. She fell, but Theron extended his arms like a snake and quickly closed them around her waist before pulling her to his side, saving her from being torn apart by the spawns that had leaped towards her previous position.
But this save had cost Theron.
The shoulder on the arm he had extended made a cracking sound because he had pushed his body beyond its limit, and his eyes watered in pain.
"Theron," Sera called out in concern.
"It is fine," Theron said. He did not look at the arm. He used the other arm to push Elara behind him, where the wedge would close around her. "It is fine. Move."
Their formation tightened, and although this moment was brief, a slight error would have created a gap, and that would have spelled the countdown for their death.
Ⓔ
They fought like demons possessed, crossing two hundred feet, and Elias was the center of this push.
His Lumina Construct and his impossible stamina gave him the capability to tear through anything in front of him as long as they were weaker than him.
There were four hundred feet between them and the mountain of flesh when it made its move.
The mountain suddenly went silent, and there was a loud rumble as thousands of spawns were thrown into the air, and a long tendril of the mountain of flesh, as a cancerous, overgrown finger, erupted from it.
The finger had traveled under the carpet of bodies all the way to their formation, and now it rose up in front of them, fifty feet tall and was as thick at its base as one of the columns of the temple.
The finger had a mouth at its tip, and the mouth opened, and inside the mouth was a wave of smaller mouths.
Hundreds of them, the size of fists, each one with three rings of teeth and an eye in the center, and they did not have bodies. They were just mouths.
These mouths made tiny chittering sounds before they began flying like insects with invisible wings
They came at the formation like a cloud, and they surrounded them.
"Brace!" Elias roared as the mouths descended on them. Elara was clutching her hip with one hand and had not gotten back her bearings when the mouths surrounded her and began to furiously bite her, and her screams were lost inside the haze of bodies.
Elias's stone armor was surrounded by dozens of them; they could not pierce stone, but their teeth could grip, and they gripped, and hung on, and as more of them came, they began to layer.
He understood the danger of these creatures after the first breath. They were not trying to kill him, but were trying to bury him under their own bodies so that the spawns coming behind them could reach the others.
His Lumina Construct was too massive to peel off all these small mouths, so he diminished one of the limbs, removing his ascendant swarm from it, and it took the form of a blood whip.
With this whip, Elias began using it to lash his body, tearing off the mouths in massive chunks.
However, even with the reduction of just one limb, the pressure on their formation multiplied.
Dozens of spawns reached Sera, far more than she could handle, and she shredded through them like a blade storm, but holes appeared in her defenses, and a spawn bit into her thigh before she could turn, opening it to the bone.
Sera's leg gave out, and she went down to one knee, and the steel of her sword extended around her in a defensive ring that bought her three seconds.
Three seconds were enough for Theron, and his good arm came down on the spawn at Sera's leg and crushed its skull; his bad arm tried to do the same on the other side and could not, as the shoulder gave a second time, and Theron made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a scream.
"My arm," he said, conversationally. "I think my arm is broken."
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