Chapter 577: Aftermath
Damien looked at the core.
Dense. Warmer than the Grade Four and Five cores had been, the warmth of it carrying something that was less like heat and more like concentrated vitality, the accumulated essence of a legendary creature distilled into the size of his closed fist. He had expected it to feel significant.
It did.
He turned it over once.
Then looked at Luton.
The slime had maintained its seal against his chest through all of it, the motion of the final exchange and the extraction and the Stormhorn’s fall, holding its position without instruction. He looked at it for a moment.
"Store it," he said. "Make it separate."
Luton extended a portion of itself toward his hand and the core transferred into it, the slime’s surface closing around it and taking it inward, not into the general mass that held everything else but into the distinct internal space Damien had learned to call the Universal Space, the particular pocket within Luton where things went when he wanted them kept rather than processed.
The core settled there.
He pressed his hand back against the wound.
Then he sat down.
Not dramatically. Just sat, in the dirt of the clearing beside the fallen Stormhorn, because standing was costing more than it needed to cost and there was nothing immediate left that required standing.
He checked the damage honestly.
The horn had gone through the right side of his chest, missing the heart by whatever margin his last-second movement had created. The lung was the concern. He could feel the edge of its function in how each breath carried slightly less than it should, a fraction of the capacity missing, the specific symptom of something in there that was not as it should be.
Not collapsed. But affected.
He breathed carefully and let the conversion process run at full rate, the life force feeding whatever his body could do with it, which was not healing in any dramatic sense but was stabilization. The bleeding that Luton was managing from the outside was being met from the inside by whatever systems were left intact.
He would live.
He was fairly certain he would live.
The certainty grew more solid with each minute that passed and the situation did not worsen.
He looked at the Stormhorn.
The body was enormous this close, the full scale of the creature only apparent now that it was still. The wings had spread partially in the fall, the dark feathers fanned out across the ground, the edging on them carrying the same charge they had carried in motion, still present even now.
A legendary creature.
Dead in a clearing in the Forest of Twin Disasters with a mana beast hunter sitting in the dirt beside it.
He looked at the altar across the clearing.
Not glowing.
He had expected this. The Stormhorn’s blood was spreading into the ground around the body, a significant quantity of it reaching the soil and beginning its saturation of the surrounding terrain, but the clearing had been empty before this fight. The altar’s radius needed more.
The Stormhorn alone was not going to be sufficient.
He thought about that.
Then looked at the treeline surrounding the clearing.
The Stormhorn had emptied this territory of everything for a significant radius. Every mana beast that had previously occupied this section of the forest had made the sensible decision to be elsewhere, and elsewhere was where they had remained for however long the Stormhorn had held this space.
But the Stormhorn was dead now.
The aura that had kept them away was gone. The pressure that had made this clearing a place nothing approached had dissolved with the creature that had generated it.
He waited.
He had the time.
His body needed the time anyway, the stabilization process requiring stillness and the conversion process working best without the additional demands of movement. So he sat, and let the forest around him do what forests did when the thing that had been suppressing them stopped suppressing them.
It took about an hour.
The first signs were small. A sound in the treeline that was not wind. A disturbance in the undergrowth at the clearing’s edge that stopped when he turned his attention toward it and resumed when he held still. The tentative reappearance of things that had been staying away, testing the changed quality of the air in the clearing, finding no aura to push back against their presence.
Finding the body.
That was the trigger.
A dead peak Grade Three mana beast represented an enormous amount of resource to the forest’s residents. Whatever had driven them away had driven away the fear, not the knowledge that something was out there. They could still smell what was here.
And what was here now was not threatening.
It was a meal.
The first beast entered the clearing from the east. Grade Four, low-end, moving with the combination of hunger and caution that characterized every scavenger’s approach to something it didn’t fully understand yet.
Damien let it come.
Waited until it was fully in the clearing, committed to the approach.
Then he stood.
The beast registered him, reversed, fled.
He let it go.
He didn’t need to kill it here. He needed it to lead.
He walked to the clearing’s edge and found a position that was visible from the treeline but not aggressive, presenting himself as present rather than as a threat that needed to be engaged. Just a man standing in a clearing beside a dead Stormhorn.
Three more beasts entered over the next thirty minutes, drawn by whatever had passed through the forest through the network of scent and disturbance that connected one creature’s awareness to another’s.
He let them come close.
Then he moved.
Not at them, not exactly. He moved in the specific way that communicated intent without commitment, the motion that said this space is mine and you are in it, and the beasts read it and fled and in fleeing they called to others by the nature of their flight, the specific communication of prey animals that said something is here, which was the most effective lure the forest offered.
More came.
Some he caught before they cleared the clearing. Grade Fours, a Grade Three among them that required more effort and cost him something in his chest that he acknowledged and continued through. He used his hands. The left, now, because the right was still managing the wound’s demand on his stability.
The altar’s radius saturated slowly.
Blood in the soil. Blood from the Stormhorn and from the beasts he killed and from the trails the fleeing ones left at the clearing’s edge. The forest floor around the altar growing darker as the organic material of the kills reached the root systems and moved through them toward the carved script.
He checked the altar between kills.
Shimmer.
Growing.
The process was slower than the third altar had been, slower than the bases where the blood had already been everywhere before he arrived. This one he was building from empty ground, adding to it piece by piece, the altar’s threshold approaching incrementally.
By late afternoon the shimmer had become genuine glow.
Not full. Not the warm, stable activation of the others. But close, and moving toward close faster than it had been an hour ago.
He killed more.
And then, between one check and the next, it was there.
Full glow.
Warm. Steady. Patient.
He stood in front of it for a moment longer than he had stood in front of the others.
Six down.
He pressed his left palm to the surface anyway, on instinct, the ritual of registration that he had performed at each of the others even though the registration had already been complete since the first altar.
Habit.
Or something more than habit.
He straightened.
Looked at the Stormhorn.
At the body. At the wings spread in the fall, the horns, the enormous frame of a creature that had not been documented alive in the known world and had just spent the better part of a day trying to kill him.
He thought about what that body represented as resource.
Then he sent the command through the bond.
Fenrir emerged from the portal quietly, the wolf’s crimson eyes sweeping the clearing before finding Damien, reading him, settling on the Stormhorn’s body.
The ears rose slightly.
"The remains," Damien said. "All of them."
Fenrir understood.
It moved toward the body with the focused purpose of something given a clear task, and what it did with the Stormhorn was thorough in the way Fenrir was thorough about everything it committed to.
The remains were not wasted. The essence concentrated in the body, in the hide and the bone and the tissue that had been accumulating Grade Three quality for decades, was exactly the kind of resource that pushed a creature of Fenrir’s current grade toward the ceiling of what that grade could hold.
Damien watched for a while.
Then looked away.
His chest hurt.
He sat down again, back against one of the clearing’s oldest trees, and let the conversion run, and watched the sixth altar glow in the growing dark of the Forest of Twin Disasters.
One left.
He would find it tomorrow.
Tonight, he needed to be still.
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