Eslaka’s work proceeded at a manic pace, hours flowing endlessly and unheeded as she ferried the fuel for her pyre to her place of power. She’d gathered the fuel in secret over long centuries, just waiting for the day she’d be allowed to use it. It was a motley collection, everything from rare wood imbued with the elemental essence of fire that caused the wood to smolder continuously to heart stones from greater fire elementals. Gems that glowed with inner heat and massive sheets of gold and platinum carved with dizzying rune arrays festooned the enormous pile.
Reisha had forbidden her to complete her life cycle. Twice, he’d found her stash and destroyed it. Both times, she’d vowed to give up, but her nature drove her to start collecting again. The primordial need to build her pyre warred with the rational knowledge that if she tried, he would simply appear and disrupt it. Six times, the need had overwhelmed her. She’d resorted to burning down forests, uncaring that the fuel lacked the essence she needed.
Those pyres had all failed, of course. Even without Reisha’s interference, they weren’t charged with the essence she’d needed. Burning up her own essence trying to make up for the lack had simply resulted in an overall weakening of her powers while her mind slowly eroded.
But now, finally, she was free to complete the next step in her life cycle. The fuel was ready. She flew overhead, circling it slowly as she examined it to ensure everything was there. It was hard to even remember what she’d hauled over, but now that she was finally on the brink of igniting her funeral pyre, she wanted it to be as powerful as possible.
Finally satisfied, she settled onto the top of the pile. It shifted under her weight, forcing her to flare her wings until everything stopped moving. With a flicker of annoyance, she reached out telekinetically to stabilize it and put a few pieces back into place. Then, with a final look around to make sure everything was perfect, she started summoning fire.
At that very moment, a cracking snap echoed through the world. Essence rippled through the fabric of reality, straining as it was pulled out of its natural flows and dragged far, far to the west. Eslaka scowled at it, but it was truthfully better that it had happened now than while she was in the middle of her immolation.
I really thought it’d take longer to wake up. Did the gods just put it to sleep and drop it in a hole? Weren’t there safeguards and wards and physical barriers restraining it? I feel like I vaguely remember them encasing it in a shell of sacred iron. There was a combined blessing thing from the whole pantheon when they wrapped that knowledge spirit around it and manifested it into physical reality.
That stupid wolf kid probably did something to mess things up. As far as she could tell, that was about all he was good for, not that she could complain. It had been touch-and-go for a week or so there, but she’d managed to point him in the right direction, plus she’d managed to adapt a version of the essence draining spell the gods had based their system on.
Most of the stolen essence had drained away already, unfortunately. Without a full understanding of the spell, she’d only been able to hold onto it temporarily. What was left was going into her pyre and would enhance her rebirth. At least it would once the essence parasite finished eating the wolf kid.
So noisy.
With a huff, she settled back into place and watched the essence start to smooth back out. As soon as the echoes of the disruption faded away, she could begin.
* * *
Velik didn’t know how many times he could summon another [Void Lance] before he exhausted himself, but he doubted he’d outlast the massive mechanical centipede in front of him. More tendrils were already spilling out of the split in its armor, and the original ones were growing longer and longer. He didn’t know what they’d do if they touched him, and he wasn’t eager to find out.
The fracture didn’t seem to slow the creature down, either. Yes, parts of its body were spilling out into the open air, but the rest of it ignored the damage and swung around to target him again. After a few seconds, he was once again dodging the immense coils of its miles-long body as it got its head into position to fire at him again.
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Mandibles opened wide, and this time he got a [Void Lance] into the mouth before it could unleash destruction at him, but whatever damage it did was probably regenerated without issue. Once again, Velik was struck by the sheer absurdity of the monster’s size. He had no idea how the gods expected him to win here.
The beam splashed off the beast’s own armor as Velik dashed across the sky, narrowly avoiding being smacked by a shifting length of its body. It left a black scar and maybe thinned the plate an inch or two, but that was it. It didn’t seem to notice or care that it had injured itself. It might not even consider what amounted to nothing more than a scratch to actually be an injury.
Velik did his best to get behind its head again, intent on hurling as many bars of disintegrating blackness into the yellow, fleshy part of the divine beast’s anatomy as he could. It wasn’t doing much good, but it was better than his previous strategy.
[Not there. Here.]
The unexpected message was so surprising that Velik missed his next step. He dropped ten feet, then threw himself into a sideways dive to avoid the beam as it swept through the air. It took some truly inspired dodging to get back ahead of things, including sending an entire body-thick bar of void out to clip the edge of the death beam where it would have caught him.
The battle moved away from the shattered mountain as the centipede pursued Velik. Foothills were crushed under its bulk, rendering the landscape into a hundred-mile web of canyons. Somehow, even as it tore through the nearby forest, Velik still couldn’t find the back end of the monster. Either it was hidden under the massive bloom of dust, or it hadn’t fully exited the ground yet. What he could see was at least ten miles long, though.
And there, in one spot about half a mile from the mouth, was an unassuming armor plate nestled between two legs. There was nothing special about it, nothing to differentiate it from any other segment in the centipede’s never-ending body. But Velik’s LPS had woken up and directed his attention to it.
What do you want? he asked it, but no amount of prodding could drag another notification out of the system. I guess that just means ‘attack that spot’ and make it up as I go.
A [Void Lance] tore through the air, soundless despite the speed, and struck that armor plate. As far as Velik could see, nothing happened. There was a small chip in the centipede’s shell, the same result as every other attack. He wasn’t discouraged. It just meant he needed to keep working on it.
Of course, that presumed he’d live that long. He was moving faster than sound trying to stay ahead of the monster’s mouth beam. The echoes of him tearing through the air were filling the whole sky, made all the worse by the thousand-ton monster chasing after him. They could probably hear the battle all the way back in Ashala.
The monster flexed a mile of its body that was dragging across the ground, throwing up a whole acre of forest into the air. The larger trees only made it a few hundred feet before gravity asserted itself on them, but the explosion hurled some smaller trees, rocks, shrubs, and what was probably a few thousand helpless monsters high enough to reach Velik.
Suddenly dealing with a projectile onslaught from below, he was forced to split his attention. Weaving through the flying debris would have been difficult on its own; doing it while avoiding the ongoing death beam was impossible.
So he didn’t try.
Instead, he carved a path through the destruction, always keeping just ahead of the centipede. At one point, a monster clinging to the shattered trunk of a large tree smacked into him, somehow still alive, but the void split it apart. Both pieces went tumbling away, already forgotten and ignored.
The attack was worrying, though. Up to this point, it hadn’t shown any signs of real intelligence. It chased Velik the way any predator chased prey. It used a simple, albeit insanely powerful, skill. It maneuvered its titanic bulk around in an attempt to pin him down.
This strategy, ripping up the landscape to fling at him, could be a sign that there was more to the beast than animalistic instinct. With something this strong, he couldn’t afford to let it surprise him. There was no predicting what it might do next, especially not once magic got added to the mix. The only solution was to go on the offensive.
Easier said than done, but at least I have a target.
Velik burst free of the debris, somehow still ahead of the centipede. The closer he got to its mouth, the easier it got to dodge its destruction beam, but also the more he had to worry about getting turned into a bloody smear if one of its legs or its massive body smacked into him.
[Void Lance] could travel for a mile or more before it lost cohesion, depending on how much matter it erased. Slicing through a thousand feet of woodland was enough to burn up the mana in them, but now that he was back in the open, he had a second or two to get some clear shots in. At the speed they were fighting at, a second or two was an eternity.
Velik dashed around the curve of the monster’s body, then unloaded a salvo into the armor plate. Flecks of metal snapped off and went flying in every direction, ignored by the monster. Perhaps it simply couldn’t feel the damage accruing, but either way, it gave Velik the time he needed to get closer. Individual bars of darkness merged into a pillar of destruction that ate away at the plate.
The first crack formed in the divine beast’s armor, right where the system had told Velik it was most vulnerable.