Chapter Four Hundred And Eight – 408
Entering the huge palace atop the hill was like walking into a graveyard. Utter silence enveloped them, and every scrape of boot or jangle of harness felt like an explosion of sound. Very soon after entering, Felix had all of them stop and wait while he mustered up his concentration.
Abyssal Skein!
Felix made sure to extend it over all of them, Hallow's Risen included. There were far more of those than previously, the various Paladins from the city as well as those they just defeated having joined Beef's horde. But as the gelid, oily sensation spread across their growing connections, Felix caught the edge of something. The way the Void Skill moved and flowed from his channels was very different from Skills like Adamant Discord. The latter had so much of its meaning baked into the idea of 'force,' of applying leverage through connections. But Abyssal Skein was about removing, subsuming and hiding. So why would he force the power outward?
Why did he have to oppose the forces around him? The Skill called out to him to slip, to slide out of view and into obscurity, through the cracks in all things. To let yourself be swallowed by the Void. That's what the Void was, after all: a hungry, endless abyss where even System energy went to die.
Abyssal Skein is level 58!
...
Abyssal Skein is level 70!
With a roar that made his ears pop, Felix felt his Abyssal Skein slip into place across his allies. It was twisted and almost invisible even to him, but if he looked at it from the right angle Felix could see that it hung about their shoulders like a vast cloak. At the same time, the Skill level notifications pinged across his vision, rapid-fire until the surge of growth settled in at level 70. Felix staggered, slightly unbalanced by the burst of System energy that flooded his core space.
Twelve levels all at once, he thought, a little dazed. All because I figured out a better way to use my Skill.
He'd once been told "greater understanding" was required to advance Skills past a certain level, but Felix had always been in such mortal danger that stress, use, and his existence as an Unbound negated those necessities. Or so he had thought. The more he thought about it, in fact, Felix realized his biggest jumps in Skill level happened when he was pressed and tried something new with his Skills. Or simply overcame bonkers odds. For him that was sadly a regular occurrence.
"Something wrong?" Beef asked him.
Felix opened his mouth just as a tremor rippled the ground beneath their feet. That deep buzzing inhalation began again, pulling in great swathes of Mana from the air. Except this time, the tremors rumbled onward, outward, into the city. A great, stentorian crack resounded from above, and one of the gold crystalline stalactites dropped like a meteor.
"Down!" Felix shouted, grabbing Beef and throwing him to the floor just as the massive stalactite impacted the city. A blastwaves of concussive heat and light and sound ripped apart buildings and narrow streets, setting off a chain reaction of other Mana crystals that burst under the pressure. Burning, freezing, cloying Mana surged everywhere, even up into the palace. The earth heaved and shook, until Felix could barely tell which way was up anymore.
Chthonic Tribute!
After several minutes, the rumbling aftershocks settled, and the tide of violent Mana receded. Felix felt full almost to bursting, and his Tribute had been only able to blunt the edge of the cataclysmic tsunami of power; the rest had been turned by the palace'sthe prison'sown hidden wards.
"Whoa," Beef said. His voice was strangely muted, until with a painful pop Felix felt his eardrums heal. "I'm really glad I didn't stay behind now."
Felix leveraged himself to his feet, feeling oddly bloated and weathered, as if he'd spent days drinking while out in the harshest of weather. "We have to keep moving. Something new is happening, and I don't like it."
Pit squawked in agreement and gathered up a number of the Risen onto his back. There was no way for the tenku to carry everyone, not even he was that big, but it helped. They moved faster than before, prodded onward by the gnawing anxiety in Felix's gut.
They encountered more traps, but every single one was violently deactivated. The hallways were by turns narrow and broad, but almost every one was partially melted. Stone and metal pooled in cooling lumps on the floor, making the walking faintly treacherous, not to mention a number of dead Paladins. These too joined Beef's army, and Felix didn't protest extending his Abyssal Skein. He had a feeling they would need all the help they could get, and soon.
After crossing a wide chasm that was somehow contained in the prison palace, and past Golem defenders that had been shattered or burned straight through, they came upon a break in the path. Steps led upward in a spiraling staircase, and straight ahead was a darkened passage that showed faint signs of light at the end. Felix tried to listen for sounds, but his Perception was still oddly deadened. He looked to Beef and Pit and Hallow. "Any ideas? Up or straight?"
Up, Pit sent immediately.
"You would," Felix replied. "Beef? Hallow?"
"I will follow the choices made," Hallow said quietly.
"Uh, well, if we go up, then maybe we can get a drop on them if they're ahead at ground level. Or maybe they're up above, and so we'll run into them if we go up, and down is the better option." The Minotaur chewed at one of his too-short nails. "II uh don't know. In games there'd be a clear path. Like a glowing trail or something. Here it's all just...it's real."
The last bit was said with a soft exhalation. Felix stared at the kid in the burly Minotaur's body, and felt like he really saw him. "It gets easier."
Beef didn't answer, just scratched his cheek and stared at his hooves. The floor was covered with the muck his Risen were slowly leaking, which was another downside of the more freshly dead corpses. Footprints were clear, and Felix was happy they hadn't had to avoid any further patrols or else...he sucked in a sharp breath and smack himself on the forehead. "Of course."
Tracking!
His Perception might have been deadened, but the Skill still functioned. The area around them lit up with dozens of lights, the majority of them glowing a blackened green. A few from him, Pit, and Beef were a shimmering multi-color and all led back the way they had come. However, there were others...and all of them save for one or two, lead straight ahead. Through the tunnel.
Tracking is level 34!
"We go up," Felix said, before explaining what he was seeing. "I'll go first, fast. Beef you'll follow after with the Risen. I'll keep Abyssal Skein on us for as long as I can. I want any Paladins dispatched quickly and quietly, alright?" He looked at them all, and received a bevy of nods and skeletal head-bobbles. "Pit, Converge please."
Under the influence of Abyssal Skein, the flash of light as Pit disappeared was hopefully unnoticed, and after a few agonizing seconds Felix began to move. With all the Agility he possessed, he sped up the spiralling staircase, ascending it faster than the others could manage. He reached the top, the only place the staircase opened onto a landing of any sort, and stared down a short passage into an airy, open space.
Two Paladins, just out of sight. They were close enough that he could feel them at least, but Felix had no way of knowing where the rest might be located, if there were indeed more. Gotta make this fast.
Slowly, flaring his Skein as hard as he could, Felix crept across the ten foot hallway and onto a wide, railing-free balcony. He had been worried about noise for nothing, because the moment he crossed the threshold, he penetrated some sort of sensory warding. The inside of the space was a thundering storm of noise and flashing lights...and the two dozen Paladins weren't even looking at the door. They were too engrossed in the multi-colored lightning playing off an absolutely gargantuan sword that rose up out of the center of the room, extending both a bit above and well below their balcony.
Felix tore his eyes from the giant, bronze blade and did what he had to do.
Rime Shaping!
Cardinal Flame!
Rime Shaping is level 45!
Red-gold flame kindled around every single Paladin all at once, catching fully half of them in its burning grip. They froze, paralyzed while the spells dire flame ate through their skin and muscle with abandon. All of them also felt the chill sting of frostbite as hands froze to hilts and mouths froze shut. Those that could move spun wildly, looking for the sourceyet by the time they had spotted him, Felix was among them all, reaping their lives with his hooked blade.
None lived to even put up a fight.
You Have Killed A Paladin Of The Pathless (x29)!
XP Earned!
Battle done and bright lights pulsing, Pit emerged from Felix's Spirit. The two of them crept toward the edge and cautiously peered down. The sword was easily two hundred feet tall and thirty feet wide, a chipped blade with a cruciform hilt and made entirely of a golden bronze.
Voracious Eye!
Name: Skyslain's Riposte
Type: Weapon (Enchanted)
Lore: Belonging to Tch'lys Skyslain, the last King of Ahkestria, the blade was a gift from the Nymean Empress. Made of Crescian Bronze and enchanted to grow at its bearer's command, it was a symbol as much as a blade. Its last use was as an anchor, a powerful spike to trap the deadliest of foes that had wrought an untenable ruin upon the kingdom.
Its hilt came right up to the ceiling, which were plated with yet more bronze and fitted with a familiar looking crystal. Not Mana, but Belais, which solidified this construction as something the Nym had a hand in fashioning. The purple amethyst was just as wide as the sword beneath it, and it glimmered with a deep well of light. In fact, Felix realized that the Belais Crystal was part of the sword, the pommel at the end of its unnaturally huge grip. Its vast blade, meanwhile, was sunk deep into the floor far, far below. They were around fifty feet from the pommel, and so the floor was over a hundred feet down. Yet nearly half of that sword-length was covered in a bony mass of...something. The Skyslain's Riposte had been driven through a creature that laid down at the base of the huge, circular chamber. The creature was a collection of scales and bonesand not just any bones, but full humanoid skeletons somehow warped and woven into one another until a greater whole had been made. It reminded Felix of the Shambling Horror he'd fought in the Haestus Temple, only far, far larger.
And it was twitching.
Voracious Eye!
ERROR!
Voracious Eye Failed.
Pit hissed, and Felix felt the same. His Eye might have failed, but the miasma of Dissonance that rolled off of it was unmistakable. This close, his Perception and Affinity felt even more stifled than before, but even so, Felix was positive their connections would burn like the sun between them. They were staring at the Primordial that was controlling the entire desert's undead, the one that was hunting him specifically. And the thing was dead itself...or perhaps undead.
Is it...aware?
There were no eyes on the creature, no face or even mouth if you discounted the thousands of humanoid skulls that composed parts of its body. It had no true shape, just a mass with tangled tendrils of bone and stretched ligaments that wrapped around the huge Skyslain's Riposte and outward, to the walls around them. Like webbing or ropes, bone and scale stretched toward the distant cylindrical walls of the chamber, all of which were covered with an unbroken collection of deepest-blue Mana crystals. Much like the city outside, it was like standing on the inside of a geode.
And all the way around the Primordial, a huge, wildly complex sigaldry array hovered, climbing up the crystalline walls in fractal patterns and confusing concentric circles. A cage of light were spat from each confluence of arrays, spun around the sword and Primordial with a deftness and skill Felix couldn't even grasp the edge ofthe working was so far beyond him that even looking to closely at it sent jabs of pain through his Mind.
At the base, where the blade sunk into the greatest chunk of the Primordial, roughly a hundred small figures in crimson armor bustled about with odd contraptions of metal and wood. The Paladins were building something, and a number of them held up long rods that inscribed glowing lines of golden light into the air. They're creating an array? To do what?
Felix couldn't parse the shapes they were designing apart from a preponderance of 'light' and 'wash' sigils. The rest of it was rounded and strange, not like the several types of sigaldry he'd seen in the past.
Behind him, Felix heard the approach of the others, along with Beef's bellows-like panting. "I ran...as fast as...I could. Whatwhat did I miss?"
Felix told him in quick terms, and Beef eyed the dead Paladins around them with a distinct gleam in his eye. "Don't raise them in here. Drag them onto the stairs. There's a sensory barrier at the threshold that should hide your magic from everyone in here."
Beef did just that, turning twenty-five of the twenty-nine Paladins into his Risen. Meanwhile Felix watched the golden array build up below him. It was a measly thing compared to the mesh of magics around the Primordial and sword, but it had a presence that Felix couldn't deny. He also realized he was wrong: the array wasn't just being created, it was being re-created, because he watched as they activated their golden sigils and the crystalline room trembled. Tremors swept outward, roaring as they erupted further away, and power was siphoned out of the Primordial's cage...before the Paladin's array collapsed on itself. Armored men and women fell, some bleeding and others dead, only to be replaced by new figures that picked up their rods and began the process all over again.
"What was that?" Beef whispered. "Felt like being on a boat about to flip over."
Felix didn't stop staring at the dead Paladins, now being dragged away by others. "They're trying to...god it's stupid. They're trying to weaken the cage around the Primordial. Each of those tremors is a piece of its power escaping into the world, or maybe its just backlash from unraveling this thing."
"Why the hell would they do that? I thought you said Primordials were like, endgame big bads?" Beef brushed a lock of shaggy hair out of his eyes. "How does it benefit them?"
"I don't know," Felix admitted. "I don't understand what the Paladins are doing with sigaldry, and the cage itself is beyond me. Those lines..." Felix stared at them, the cable-thick lines of light that extended outward from the sword and beast. Many to the walls, but they all curved slightly before they impacted the crystal-lined surface, and the ones up top simply went straight up. "They're going up. But what's above us?"
Felix flared Oathbinding, Cardinal Flame, and even attempted Manasight. The world devolved into streamers of blinding light, but he pressed on, through it, sorting away the flood of water Mana and focusing on the stomach-churning pillar of blackened-green and orange-brown that was the Primordial itself.
Manasight is level 70!
He could feel his nose bleeding, and the pain in his Mind spiked harder than ever, but there was something Felix was missing. Strands of the Primordial were being teased away, not just by the Paladins and their strange attempts, but by the cage around it. Those lines of light that went up, Felix quickly realized they carried pieces of the Primordial with it, channeling it somewhere else.
Oathbinding is level 45!
Oathbinding is level 46!
Threads of Primordial power soared upward, alongside silver cords that extended deep into Felix's own chest. The Oaths of his people, of his friends, were leading in the exact same direction.
"We're under Ahkestria?" he said, the realization sending a shock of horror through him. "And this array...what was its purpose?"
Manasight is level 71!
He could recognize parts of it now that the bulk of the cage was left behind. In the cable-thick threads he identified tiny portions that were similar to the array he'd once designed to fight off a clutch of vile Urges. In comparison however, his Devour Array couldn't hold a candle to this masterwork of complexity. It was pulling something vital from the Primordial corpse, its Essence somehow being siphoned up and out...to the city.
In a flash of understanding, Felix knew its purpose.
Theurgist of the Rise is level 82!
"The cage is stealing the Primordial's Essence and...and it's feeding it to the Highest Flame," he said.
Hallow looked at him sharply through the eyes of a man he'd just killed. Beef, meanwhile, just scratched his head. "What?"
How long have they been doing this? It appeared the cage was feeding on the Primordial in order to keep it docile and "dead" or at least quiescent. Like the Essence Anchor, but instead of dumping all that power into the Void, it was using it. Or it had been, because very little Essence was being extracted now, and a great deal still lingered within the writhing mass of scales and bone. Why? Was the array failing or something else? Either way, the Paladins are clearly trying to destroy the array. Did they know it was a chain around the Primordial's neck? Or...wait.
Below them, a new array was going up, as eighteen Paladins rapidly inscribed figures in the air with golden light. Those new sigils were forming into glyphs and connecting into a new formation that finally made a bit of sense to him. Felix parsed only that it was a redirection of some sort.
"They're trying to steal the Primordial's powers?" Felix was confused. "How does that benefit them? They can't use it, or else they'll get the flesh curse too."
"It...it feels like strings snapping," Beef said beside him. He was holding his head in clear pain, and was blinking past tears. The lowest portion of the cage stripped and broke apart even more, pieces of it replaced by new, golden light. "It's so bad. Can't you hear that? The storm, Felix. It's the storm."
Oh shit.
The Highest Flame wasn't just sustaining itself on the Primordial. It was fueling the stormwall with it, too.
Updated from fr𝒆ewebnov𝒆l.(c)om