Chapter 1459: Until The Afternoon

By the time the sun cleared the eastern rim of the valley, Northern had stopped reading the messages.

They had not stopped coming. They scrolled past behind his eyes in a steady, silent stream, the same few lines over and over, slain and gained, slain and gained, Devil and Catastrophe, eighteen and twelve. Every so often a third line slipped in among them.

[Echo acquired: Devil Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

He let them run. He could add them up later.

[Tempest’s Cadence: Tier 5]

The Cadence had stopped climbing a little after dawn. It did not seem to go any higher than five, not for a Sage, or at least not for the part of the talent this body could reach. But five was enough. At five, the two black blades in his hands moved faster than his own eyes could follow, so he let Flow Perception and the Cadence do the work together while he simply watched and kept his feet moving.

That was the only real rule of Tempest’s Cadence. Keep moving. The moment he stopped, it would all drain away, and he would have to build it back up from the beginning.

So he did not stop.

The Hunters learned that very quickly. They learned everything very quickly.

In the first hour, they had come at him the way they had come at the Keep, in pairs and loose threes, probing, patient, testing where his blades reached and where they did not. It had not worked. He was too fast for pairs. By the time a pair had tested him, it was dead.

So in the second hour, the drumming in the ground changed.

It grew slower and heavier, until he could feel each beat through the soles of his boots, and the Hunters stopped coming at him at all. They pulled back and formed rings instead, great rings of them, three and four deep, all the way around him, twenty paces away, spears raised to their shoulders. Northern cut down the Hunters closest to him and watched the rings form, and for a moment he did not understand what he was looking at.

Then the drumming stopped.

And every Hunter in the ring threw at once.

He had fought a great many enemies who were stronger than these. He had fought Belials who could break a hill. None of them had ever done anything quite like this. There were perhaps four hundred spears in the air, coming at him from every direction at the same instant, low and high and in between, thrown so perfectly together that there was simply no gap between them to step through.

Afterimage Legion caught most of them. The ghosts that Phantom Strike left behind at every step, dozens of them by now, turned and took the spears meant for him and burst like smoke.

Most of them. Not all.

Three spears went through him. One in the thigh, one high in the back below the shoulder blade, and one straight through the middle of his left forearm, pinning the black blade in that hand uselessly against his side.

The pain was very bright, and very sudden, and for one long moment it was the only thing in the world.

Northern looked down at the spear through his arm.

’Oh. Ow.’

He had to admit it. Individually, they were nothing. Together, for one breath, they had done what an Ascendant with the Heritage of Flames had not managed to do. Under the pain, it stirred something odd and warm in his chest, almost like pride.

Full Impact had caught every ounce of it.

He had turned on Recoil the moment he saw the rings form, because he was not stupid, and Recoil did not care whether a blow landed on him or on one of his afterimages. Four hundred spears, thrown with the full strength of four hundred bodies, had struck him and his ghosts in the same instant, and every bit of that force was sitting inside him now, humming in his bones, waiting to be spent.

He pulled the spear out of his forearm with his teeth.

Then he spent it.

He did not throw anything. He simply turned in a circle with both black blades extended, once, and let Recoil pour every blow he had just taken back out through the edges.

The inner ring stopped existing. The second ring was thrown backwards so hard that it went into the third, and the third into the fourth, and the whole great circle of Hunters around him folded outward like a flower opening, and fell, and did not get up.

[...]

[Echo acquired: Devil Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[...]

In the silence afterwards, Northern stood in the middle of a ring of the dead with three holes in him and his breath coming hard, and grinned so widely that his face hurt.

’Again. Do that again.’

They did it again. They did it four more times before noon, and they got better at it every time, and every time they got better, Recoil gave it back to them a little harder.

He had never been hurt so much in a single morning. This body was a True Clone, and it bled like a real one, and by the end of the third ring he had stopped trying to count the holes. He let Infinite Iteration close the worst of them as he moved and ignored the rest. The Cadence did not care how much he bled, so long as he kept moving.

Somewhere in the fourth hour, he found himself standing on top of something.

He looked down.

It was bodies. Without ever meaning to, he had been fighting in more or less the same place since the rings began. The dead had piled up around his feet, he had climbed onto them without noticing, and the pile had grown under him with every Hunter that came at him. It was higher than his head now.

It was higher than the lowest roots of the great trees. The Hunters coming at him had to climb the slope of their own dead to reach him, slipping and scrambling on limbs and loose spear shafts, and there was no way to form a ring on a slope made of bodies.

’Well. That’s a happy accident.’

He stayed there.

The sun climbed. Noon came and went. The mist from the censers, trapped in the windless valley, lay perfectly flat and grey around the base of his heap like a moat. This body’s essence was draining, steadily and noticeably. A body carrying one talent was cheap. A body carrying half the sheet at once, all of it running flat out, was not, and somewhere in the back of his mind he could feel his other bodies, far to the south, tactfully saying nothing.

He did not stop. He would pay the bill later.

It was early in the afternoon when the Hunters stopped coming.

They did not break, even now. They did not run for the ice walls. They simply drew back from the foot of his heap, all of them at once, in good order, carrying their wounded, and they went down the valley, away from him, toward the far end, toward the biggest tree.

And there they stopped, in front of the hall where no fire burned.

There were still so many of them. Three thousand. Perhaps four. They formed up in front of the hall in rank after rank, shoulder to shoulder, spears grounded, perfectly still, and for the first time since dawn, they were not facing him at all.

Four of them stood in front of the rest. They were bigger than any Hunter he had fought all day, and they stood between the ranks and the hall like a set of doors, and even from the top of his heap Northern could feel them. Their presence settled on the back of his neck like a heavy hand, the kind of weight that tells a man there is no point to any of it. He had had despair laid on him by far worse things. He noted it and set it aside.

They were facing the hall.

Then the drumming started again.

It was different this time. It was slow, far slower than anything before, one great beat and then a long pause, one great beat and then a long pause, like a heart. Every spear in the valley came down on the frozen ground together. Northern felt it through the bodies under his boots, through his bones, through the roots of the trees.

Out of the black mouth of the hall, the mist began to pour.

It came out the way breath comes out of a sleeper on a cold morning, in a long, slow, grey exhalation, far thicker than anything the censers had made, and it rolled out over the ranks of the Hunters and over the valley floor and up the slope of Northern’s heap, and where it touched the censers hanging from the roots, they filled.

Northern stared at it.

’Oh... so that’s where the mist comes from.’

The ground shook. Not with drumming. Something inside the hall was moving, something vast and slow, and every root of the great tree above it groaned at once.

Northern straightened on top of his mountain of the dead. He wiped the blood off one black blade onto his sleeve, and then off the other, and then he did not bother anymore.

He was still grinning.