A wave of ash that was as dense as a brick wall poured into Elias's body, and a wave of heat filled him up… if the spawns he had been killing were candle flames, this was a whole furnace, and Elias could feel his Vein Completion rate shooting up.
The second finger came at Elias from the right, reacting quickly because it had sensed Elias tear through the first. It whipped towards Elias like a massive blade of flesh and bone.
The finger crushed dozens of spawns in its way as a wave of air pushed towards Elias with a loud whooshing sound.
He raised the cleaver, and judging the distance, he pushed towards the finger and met it at the middle of the slash, drastically cutting away the maximum momentum that the finger would have attained.
The finger's outer wall was tough, and it carried a massive amount of mass, but the cleaver created by the Ascendant Swarm was supernaturally sharp.
There was a sickening slicing sound as the blade went through the finger in a clean cut. The upper half spun off into the bodies, crushing hundreds before transforming into ash, while the lower half spasmed and retracted into the floor.
The third and fourth fingers came together; it seemed that they were learning. Elias liked that.
If the challenge was too stable, he was not growing.
The third struck high, the fourth struck low, and the timing of their strikes was such that whatever block he raised would only stop one of them.
He let the high finger come, but he did not block it, even though he had a shield.
Elias stepped inside its arc, which the finger had not expected, and the finger overswung, and Elias, inside the arc, drove the cleaver upward through the thinner muscle on the underside of the finger and out through the top of it.
The finger split lengthwise from base to tip, and what fell on him was not the upper half of a finger. It was the inside of a finger, and the inside of a finger contained the smaller mouths, and they fell on him in a screaming hail.
He did not move to brush them off. He had stone armor. He had hunger. The smaller mouths bit at the stone and broke their teeth on it, and the hunger drank what they spilled, and it was sated for a while… but just for a while.
The low finger had reached his legs by then, and it wrapped around his left ankle, trying to lift him.
The blood-iron whips at his back made a decision he had not consciously made. Two of them uncoiled, dropped, and severed the finger four feet below his ankle, and the severed end lay on the glass, twitching, and Elias kicked it off and kept moving, as a wave of ash followed him.
He was getting into his groove, and his heartbeat was no longer steady.
The fifth finger he took with the cleaver in one motion, a two-handed swing that opened it from collar to base in a single line. Its meat fell apart along the line and did not put itself back together before it became ash.
The sixth finger, he did not get to. Elara, behind him, had been gathering frost and light in her palm without the pressure of the spawns.
Her talent was related to light, and yet she practiced an ice-based Lumina Art.
It was unknown why she was not practicing an art that would enhance her talents, but Elias realized that such a thing should be rare, and only nobility like Tarian could have perfect art that aided their talent.
Even he, with all his resources and holding three Lumina Arts, did not have a Lumina Art that perfectly merged with his Elder Talent.
Elara had been following the movements of Elias, and when she saw an opportunity, the frost left her hands as a thread, and the thread crossed two hundred feet of air in a half-second, found the joint where the sixth finger met the floor, and fed itself into the joint. The fingers' lower thirty feet froze in a single breath, and the upper twenty, deprived of whatever moved it, simply fell over and shattered against the bodies.
"Elara," Theron said, from somewhere behind, with a wonder in his voice that he had not had time to be surprised by until now. "How long have you been able to—"
A small growl emerged from Elias' chest as he was a bit pissed off that his prey was stolen, especially when they were a great source of energy for his Vein Completion.
Five fingers down, and he could feel two more under the ground that had not yet risen. The mountain itself was four hundred and twenty feet from his position, and the closest of the thousand mouths was looking at him with an expression he would not have called an expression on any other face.
Still, it surprised Elias that he was still able to read an expression from what were just slabs of flesh, mouths, and eyes.
Those yellow eyes… everything he could sense was coming from those eyes.
The Passenger laughed.
"He is delighted with you," it said. "I can sense it… Open yourself to it, and you will as well. It is easy, like falling into a dream."
"Keep talking, and I will find a way to feed you to it." Elias thought back and did not break stride.
Ⓔ
The seventh finger was the one he did not see coming. Unlike the others that announced themselves with rumbles and parted bodies and a long, slow, theatrical erection of cancerous flesh. The seventh finger was thinner than the others, perhaps eight inches across at its base, and it had been traveling under the carpet of bodies the way a snake traveled under leaves.
Elias had committed forward and had just taken out the sixth finger. He was sixty feet from the central swell, with his Lumina Construct extended, when the seventh finger came up through the floor of bodies directly beneath him without the courtesy of a tremor.
He had sensed the danger a moment before the finger touched his skin, and was already moving his shield to block, but the speed and power behind the thrust was several times stronger than anything the flesh mountain had displayed before, and the angle of the attack prevented him from moving his shield to block effectively.
It punched through his stone armor at the small of his back. His Stone Skin held for an eighth of a second before it failed.
The armor bent inward with a sound like a stone column had been crushed, and the bending pushed the spike of the finger forward through the armor's interior, and the spike, which had been narrowed to a point, found the gap between his lowest ribs and entered him.
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