"Move," Elias growled, pushing his Lumina Construct to the limit and tearing through waves of bodies as he tried to reduce the pressure on the rest.
Beside the first finger from the mountain of flesh, a second was beginning to rise.
Theron gasped in pain as his bad arm hung from his shoulder at an angle that was no longer normal. The cloud of mouths was reforming, as the second finger was beginning to open up like a flower made from flesh and bone.
There was a slight pause, and then the second finger spat barbs that were the size of spear-tips, and they were made of bone.
They came in a horizontal hail that crossed the distance between the finger and the wedge in a fraction of a second.
While the mouths released by the first finger were relatively slow, these ones moved faster than they had expected, and Kaelen took three of them before his hammer could crush them.
The first hit his shoulder and stopped against his hard bones, the second hit his thigh and lodged in the meat there but did not penetrate to the bone, but the third was more devastating as it hit the back of his neck, in the gap between his collar and his skull, and Kaelen's head jerked forward, causing a spray of blood nearly four feet high.
A fourth of an inch was the difference between Kaelen losing his head and Kaelen losing only the use of his right arm and his right leg.
The barb stayed in his neck, but Kaelen did not fall; his vitality was ridiculous, and Elias had quietly noted that after Tarian, Kaelen was the most powerful.
He reached up with his free hand, gripped the barb, and tried to pull. It would not come. It had punched through something that did not want to give it back.
"Leave it," Elara said, from somewhere on the ground behind him. She was crawling on the ground, sheltering between the legs of her companion while he regained her powers. "If you pull it, you bleed out. Leave it."
Kaelen grunted in irritation and left the barb in his neck, but he stepped back a bit into Elias's shadow, looking worriedly ahead of him and seeing there were still three hundred feet remaining to reach the mountain of flesh.
Ⓔ
Inside Elias's head, the Passenger was laughing, and Elias could understand its amusement, even though he did not want to.
Inside him, something was building, the dark appetite and the hunger that even the Hollow Monarch's scripture had drunk and drunk and drunk, and was still thirsty.
Creating his first Lumina Construct had eased off that pressure a bit, but after he was thrown into this chaos, with the smell of blood and death, the screams of these creatures, and the flesh mountain that he was sure was an avatar of that yellow-eyed boy from the Fragment of Divinity… the hold Elias had on his mind was slipping.
He had been running cold this entire battle. His role here was to run the formation as a tactician, watching his people, adjusting his constructs, holding the line, and the appetite had been waiting in him with the patience of a thing that knew its turn would come.
In front, the fingers of the mountain of flesh were rising in greater numbers; four were already up, and he could feel two more from the vibrations under the floor.
He could not hold the line as a tactician any longer. The line was too long. There were too many things attacking it. They would die at this rate within the next minute, all four of them, before they reached the mountain.
Elias knew that at this moment, he had a choice,
He could call up the four hundred and fifty unspent attribute points the System was holding for him, pour them into Strength or Esoteric or whatever would give him the most return, and try to brute-force the next three hundred feet. That would burn the points before he understood what he was buying with them. It would solve this minute. It would not solve the mountain.
Or he could let the appetite out.
"Yesss!!!" the Passenger screamed, and Elias agreed with it… he let the appetite out.
His first Lumina Construct was a fusion, but even this had been done whe his mind was still more stable, and he had found inspiration in calmness.
At that time, it was like he was in the center of a tornado, and in the eye of the storm, his mind had found peace, and he had heard the voices of his Ascendant Swarm, leading to the creation of this construct.
However, when he unleashed his appetite, he did not find calm; he found the opposite of calm.
This was the analytical part of him that had kept his mind straight for hours, stepping aside, and the thing underneath stepping forward, and the thing underneath had been waiting for as long as he could remember.
He was too weak as a mortal, so he never allowed his appetites to show, but now, he could see how much of himself was buried.
Elias's eyes, which had been the color of granite, ignited. The prismatic flicker that had once lived in his irises before they became stone returned all at once, and behind the granite, the flicker showed through as a color that was every color and none of them, and the spawns in their thousands in front of him paused.
It was not a conscious response; it was their body seizing up by itself, like a beast whose head was placed inside the jaws of a predator.
The Passenger whispered inside his head, " Now hunt."
The spider-legs did not change shape, but their behavior did. They had been processing the spawns that came before, and now they began killing. The difference was small in description, and very large in practice. A processing leg engaged the nearest threat. A killing leg engaged the threat that was about to kill most of his allies.
The difference was a half-second of priority, and the half-second saved Sera's other leg, Kaelen's other arm, and Theron's life, twice, in the next ten seconds.
The blood-iron whips uncoiled from his spine. He had been using them sparingly because the cost of keeping them was high, and now he stopped caring about the cost, and they came out, six of them, and they struck like spears, serving as a roaming defense for the others while the spider limbs harvested lives like grass.
Elias began to move; he was not walking or running, and he covered the next thirty feet in a series of motions that felt as if he was standing in place, yet the world itself was the one moving.
The air in front of him turned to ash before his boots reached it, and the appetite drank the ash, and the Vein Completion at the corner of his vision began to climb in a way it had not climbed all battle.
Vein Completion (Void Scripture): 16.71% → 18.04% → 19.91%
Vein Completion (Crimson Vein): 48.40% → 50.12%
Vein Completion (Art of Stone): 32.58% → 33.84%
The four behind him moved with him; they felt as if they were moving beside an erupting volcano, but paradoxically, safety could only be found if they were closer to the volcano than farther away.
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