Chapter 580: Let’s See It
Aquila came through the portal and landed on the nearest old tree with the controlled, precise weight it always used, the golden eyes finding him immediately.
Damien looked at the cores in his hand.
Then at Aquila.
"These are for you," he said.
He held them out.
Aquila regarded them from its branch for a moment, the assessment quick and complete the way the griffin’s assessments always were, and then descended to the clearing floor and approached.
It took them carefully.
Not with the urgency of something starving or the indifference of something that considered the offering beneath it. With the specific attentiveness of a creature that understood what was being given and why, processing each core with a thoroughness that suggested it was doing more than eating.
Damien watched.
The quantity was significant. More than two dozen cores across the grade range Lin had produced, the accumulated essence of a night’s worth of mana beasts fed to a Griffin that had been the weakest thing in his roster since the roster had grown past two. The cores disappeared one by one, Aquila working through them with patient efficiency.
When the last one was gone, the Griffin sat still for a moment.
The quality of its presence had changed. Not dramatically, not in the way a grade advancement felt, but the density of the aura it carried had shifted upward fractionally. A meaningful increment. Repeated enough times it would add to something significant.
Damien nodded once.
Aquila’s head dipped slightly.
He cancelled the summon and watched the Griffin dissolve back into the portal, the clearing quieter without the weight of its presence.
He looked at Luton.
The slime was on the ground nearby, having descended from its head position at some point during the core collection to do its own survey of the clearing, moving between the bodies with the unhurried quality it brought to every cleanup process.
Damien’s stomach had opinions that were becoming harder to ignore.
He thought about the situation practically. He was a significant distance from any settlement, in the middle of a forest that was not known for hospitality, with one altar remaining between him and whatever the Ascension Land was going to present.
Hunting was the obvious answer. He had the skills and the location and the access to more than enough prey.
He also had Luton.
He looked at the slime.
Luton looked back.
"I’m going to sit here and think about the last altar," Damien said. "You go find us something to eat. Whatever you come back with is what we’re having."
Luton’s surface rippled.
A pulse that could have been agreement or enthusiasm or simply the acknowledgment of a task received. Then it moved, departing the clearing in the direction of the denser forest with the particular quality it had when it was going somewhere with purpose, the shape of it compact and directed.
He watched it go.
Then turned back to the clearing and found a section of ground that was relatively undisturbed by Lin’s activities and sat down with the record fragment.
He had read it enough times that the contents were already committed to memory, but the habit of reviewing had been useful across the altar process and he saw no reason to abandon it for the final one.
The seventh altar’s location was the deepest point in the forest he had yet been directed to. The coordinates placed it close to the center, not at the center itself, but adjacent in a way that was probably intentional given what the center contained. A final check before the full unsealing. The last proof of slaughter before the seal released.
He thought about what the full unsealing would mean.
About a Grade One creature, sealed and waiting, dormant in a state that was not sleep and not death, the Stormhorn’s counterpart at a grade that made the Stormhorn seem like an introduction.
About the demon race that had spent centuries making sure this moment did not happen.
He was going to make it happen.
He thought about the approach to the seventh altar. Whether the pattern of the previous altars held, whether the natural occupation of the terrain near the center of an Ascension Land would provide the saturation the altar needed or whether he would have to build it the way he had built the fourth.
He thought about his reserves and his current state and what the last altar would require.
He was deep enough in the thinking that he almost missed the shift in the clearing’s quality.
Almost.
The ambient essence changed in the specific way it changed when something that carried significant grade entered the space. Not threatening, not directed at him, just present. The particular signature of a high-grade mana beast in close proximity.
He looked up.
Luton was back.
The slime sat at the edge of the clearing, its surface carrying the specific quality it had after a significant use of the Universal Space. Fuller. The faint shimmer of absorbed material.
Damien waited.
"Let’s see it," he said.
Luton released its contents.
The Grade Three mana beast arrived in the clearing with the specific quality of something that had been inside Luton’s Universal Space and had not enjoyed the experience.
The creature was large and heavy. Built like a boulder with legs and a head that was mostly forward-facing weaponry. It registered its surroundings in the fraction of a second after emergence and arrived at the correct conclusion that it was not where it had been before.
It also registered Damien.
Damien had, in the space of the same fraction of a second, arrived at the conclusion that Luton had taken the instruction entirely literally and had not interpreted whatever you come back with as a figure of speech suggesting something reasonable.
He stared at the Grade Three.
The Grade Three stared at him.
The clearing was very quiet.
Damien looked at Luton.
Luton pulsed.
The pulse carried, as far as Damien could interpret it, the energy of a task completed successfully and a summon awaiting acknowledgment of its excellent work.
He looked back at the Grade Three.
The Grade Three had decided, in the intervening two seconds, that whatever had brought it here was less important than what was in front of it, and what was in front of it was a human sitting on the ground at eye level with no visible weapons and no summons currently deployed.
It lowered its head.
Damien stood up very quickly.
"That is not what I meant," he said to Luton.
Luton pulsed again.
There was a brief moment where he considered the options.
Run!
Not seriously though. He had not run from anything in a long time and was not going to start with a mana beast that Luton had brought to him in a clearing. Summon Cerbe and have it handled in ten seconds. Practical, but that felt like admitting something he was not ready to admit.
Or deal with it himself.
He was healed. Fully healed, Lin’s thoroughness having left nothing unfinished. His chest was sound, his right arm had its full range, his essence reserves were the best they had been since before the third stronghold.
He looked at the Grade Three beast in front of him.
It looked back.
The disorientation of the Universal Space extraction had cleared. The beast had its bearings now, which meant it had gone from confused to threatened, and threatened was a much more motivated state.
The overlapping hide on its body had tightened, the plates compressing against each other in the way armored creatures prepared for impact, and its head had lowered into the forward-weighted stance of something that had decided the thing in front of it was the source of its current situation and had feelings about that.
Damien rolled his neck once.
Then his left shoulder.
Then his right, carefully, confirming what he already knew which was that it moved without restriction.
"Alright," he said.
The beast charged.
It was fast for its build. The armored hide created a silhouette that suggested slowness, the mass of it, the low center of gravity, but the legs beneath that mass were moving with a speed that the silhouette had no business producing. He had seen this before with the Stormhorn. High grade creatures were rarely as slow as their size implied.
He went sideways.
The beast tracked the movement but the tracking was late, the turn taking longer than the initial straight-line acceleration had, and by the time it had corrected for his direction change he was already behind its original trajectory.
He drove his left palm into its flank.
The hide was dense. High Grade Three armor construction, the kind that had been building through the beast’s lifetime, each plate harder than the one before it as the essence saturated through. His entry met it squarely and the essence cut found resistance without finding a stop.
He pushed through.
The beast registered the intrusion and went for the same counter the Stormhorn had used in the final exchange. The roll. The full weight of the body dropping sideways to break the entry angle.
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