Despite the difficulties of moving inside a battlefield like this, the person in front of them was pointing the way, and the majority of the burden rested on him, and so the rest followed.
Sera was on one leg, but her blade had spread across the ground under her boot like a film, and the film was sliding her along, and she stayed inside the formation.
Theron held his bad arm to his chest with his good arm. He was a heavy man with one good arm, and he used his weight; he picked up spawns and threw them into other spawns, and what landed were in pieces.
Elara could not bend light until she recovered, but she was able to use her left hand to leave frost trails across the ground, and the frost trails were not decorative; they slowed the spawns that crossed them, and slowed spawns died. Kaelen stood beside her, and, wielding his hammer with his left hand, he swept aside the few spawns that passed through the devastation that Elias was creating.
His eyes followed what he could of the battle, and the way he looked at Elias was beginning to transform into something like adoration.
Elias was like a vacuum, as massive tides of ash were being sucked into his body with every step he was taking.
From a distance, it had been hard to see this happening, but now that they were close to him, the shock and astonishment in their hearts could not be understated.
They knew that this ash could enhance talent; however, from their calculations, even a few pounds of this ash was more than enough for them before their body reached saturation, but Elias was consuming the ash in tonnes!
It was as if he were a hole that could never be filled, and the more they stayed with him, the less they began to regard him as an equal.
In fact, he did not even seem human.
Inside her heart, Elara whispered, "Why are we even here?"
Ⓔ
"Hold the line behind me," Elias said, and his voice sounded a bit strained.
However, this was not because he was tired; it was simply a struggle for him to channel the storm that he had become, else he would have left everyone behind and pushed forward by himself.
Sera, on one good leg, did not argue. She had been listening to him long enough to know the difference between a request and an instruction, and this had not been a request.
"Hold," she said to the others.
Theron, breathing through his teeth, with his bad arm cradled in his good one, did not waste breath on anything. He set his boots and turned his good shoulder out, and the formation, which had been a moving thing for the last three hundred feet, became stationary.
Kaelen pressed his palm flat to the ground, and a wall of stone began to rise that surrounded them… This would not last for long, but it could buy them some time.
Elara, on her knees behind him, began to freeze the surface of the wall, making it slick. This should make it difficult for the spawns to climb the wall.
Elias stepped forward, alone, and his mind suddenly felt free, because he did not have to worry about protecting those behind him.
Inside his Lumina Space was a vast field filled with body parts, the broken souls of these spawns, and above them all, his Elder Talent was pulsing with a red glow, shining brighter than it had ever done before.
In that moment, Elias followed his instincts and no longer held back the 450 points he was holding on to for emergencies.
He poured everything inside Esoteric and his Elder Talent… roared
The sound sent a vibration through his body and soul, and if not for two of the legs of his Lumina Construct supporting him, he would have stumbled and fallen to the ground.
In this moment, he had just finalized that he was a peak Fury Forge, and already, he could feel the call of the Fragment of Divinity in his soul. If he wished, he could call upon it and take the trial for the Mist Phantom level.
"Fuck that was crazy… but I like it!"
His analytical self would never have done what he did, but Elias knew he took this option because he did not want a fallback when the situation went dangerous… he wanted to be pushed to the limit and then break those limits. Having more attribute points saved up would just do nothing but extend these limits and delay his growth.
Better to push it all into Esoteric and expand his talent.
The spawns in front of him melted before him like snow under the glare of the burning sun. The passenger inside his head was screaming with so much frenzy that Elias was surprised that no one could hear it.
"More! More! More!!! I want more!!!"
The ground shook as six massive fingers of flesh rose ahead, all of them focusing on Elias, as they could tell that nothing here would be able to stop him.
Elias seized the air beside him and made a drawing motion, and seemingly from the air, a massive blade appeared, forged from his Ascendant Swarm.
The blade was a cleaver, thick at the spine and thin at the edge, made for nothing but butchery, and he pushed his Ascendant Swarm to enhance its weight as much as possible.
The mouths at the tip of the fingers from the mountain of flesh, all pointed towards him and they were about to spit when the figure of Elias seemingly vanished.
All this time, Elias had been moving at half the speed he was capable of, mostly because he did not want to lose the chance to absorb the ash pouring inside his body.
The appearance of his stone armor gave him the look of a slow slab of mountain. His weight, which had reached a thousand kilograms, made the ground shake any time he took a step, and so it was easy to believe that he was moving at his top speed, which was already fast.
Elias kept his true speed as a secret until he needed them, and now he unleashed it.
In an instant, he arrived near the base of the first finger and reverted one of the six legs of his Lumina Construct into a massive blood whip, which uncoiled from his back in a single motion that was too fast for the eye to register.
The whip wrapped twice around the middle of the finger ten feet below the mouth, and Elias twisted his wrist, causing the whip to twist with the wrist. The finger began to compress as each twist of the whip dug deeper into it.
In the fifth rotation, the muscle gave way like overcooked meat under a butcher's knife, and the upper twenty feet of the finger fell off the lower thirty and slapped onto the carpet of bodies with a wet finality; the mouth, still open, did not finish closing.
This happened so quickly that those at the back could barely follow, but Elias was already onto the next.
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