Chapter 488: Web of Lightning

[ Warning... First Seal Loosened. ]

"Yes," I said. "I know."

I had maybe a minute before the eruption began to ramp up. I stood up in the air, switched out Heaven Beast Tamer for Lightning Arcanist, rolled my shoulders, and let the power of my soul radiate out of my flesh. Not all of it. Not even close to all of it. Enough that the air around me started to hum and the grass far below me began to curl.

There was no longer any weird desire to drink blood now that my soul had regained its true state, and I could fight at my full potential. After four months, the lightning in my channels started to move the way it should.

I was not going to hold back this time. I was not going to be subtle. I was going to kill every demon that came out of whatever hell they came from, and I was going to do it as fast as I could.

The time I had spent sitting was not wasted. I used it spinning.

My body could unleash my magic properly again, and I wanted to see how far I had grown.

The Loom came out of me in threads thinner than a hair, and they arced across the sky before burying themselves in the ground. I laid them down in a lattice across the sky and the ground and the air between.

Being a Grandmaster of Inscription meant that building this lattice was simplicity itself, and I knew it was only the basic scaffold for what I was planning.

I paused. I had woven a web a quarter of a mile across and I could not feel any strain in my channels or my Anima. I could still give more. I grinned and went all out, and before long I was standing in the air with six miles of invisible lightning hanging around me.

Six miles... was that enough? No. I could give more. I had barely dipped into my Anima regeneration with the web I had spun. My body turned into a blue sun as I spun more threads, all of them guided by Inscription at the Sovereign level.

Time meant nothing. My web soon covered the plain from the camp to the eastern ridge and up into the clouds, and Anima radiated out of me every second in a pulse that anyone would feel for a hundred miles.

∞

The eruption had started a while ago, but I barely noticed. The Khaaz coming out of the fissures hardly registered to my senses on the scale of energy, though their auras, which screamed desolation and madness, were foul.

They were still the same while I had changed so much. Six limbs, sickle blades in front, spear-points in the middle, the heavy curved pair at the back driving them forward. Iron-dark chitin, narrow heads, and those pale jaw tendrils swinging as they came up out of the dark and tasted the air.

The first one died in the first second of its life on this world, as it came up through a fissure directly beneath a thread, and it came apart from the top of its skull down through the spine. The two halves of it had not even fallen before it turned to ash, and the rest followed behind it.

I raised my left hand a little and my entire web rose with it, so I could have the chance to polish my work. I manifested my Inscription Pen in my right hand and began the next portion of it.

∞

Underneath my web of lightning, the Khaaz were gathering in increasing numbers. Thousands. Then tens of thousands.

They came up out of every fissure in a black tide and spread across the plain like machines made of flesh and chitin, and I let them come.

As I worked with my pen, I watched that flood pour across the plain under six miles of threads they could not see, and I waited until the leading edge had reached the ridge and the trailing edge was still climbing out of the ground, and I could no longer see the ground at all.

Then I moved one finger.

The web closed. Not all of it. What I had made, and was still making, was far too large for that. I shut the parts that mattered, and a portion of the web drew tight.

The sound of tens of thousands of bodies coming apart in the same instant does not make a noise you can name. It would give a mortal nightmares, and what made it worse was the relative silence it happened in.

Then there was a silence of about two seconds before the next ten thousand climbed out of the ground and walked into the pieces of the last.

The dark fluid inside them vaporises when it is heated. My threads are lightning. So the demons became a long rolling wall of black vapour and fire that rose four hundred feet and ran a mile across before it collapsed into ash.

I lifted my hand, let their numbers grow, and when they reached a suitable count, I closed the web again.

And again.

[ Stored Essence: 912,870 → 913,004 ]

I looked at that number for a while. A hundred and thirty-four points for something close to a hundred thousand Khaaz.

A Khaaz was worth almost nothing to me now, and a Khaazim was barely better. I was waiting for the real meal. Three-horned Sorcerers were the appetisers, and what I wanted were the greater demons above them.

Until then, this was housekeeping. I flicked my finger again, and another thirty thousand died, and the wall of fire on the plain went up another hundred feet.

The Khaaz kept coming. They did not stop. They climbed out of the ground and walked into the web and died, and the ones behind them climbed over the ashes of the ones in front and walked into the web and died, and the ones behind them did the same.

The plain was filling with ash. The ash was filling with fire. The fire was filling with more Khaaz, and the more Khaaz I killed, the more ash there was, and the more ash there was, the more the plain became something else.

[ Stored Essence: 913,004 → 913,187 ]

A hundred and eighty-three points. Another hundred thousand.

I kept going.

My web told me when the first Khaazim entered the field of slaughter. The fissure had widened, enough for something the size of a house to climb out.

Eight legs, armoured body, armoured torso, armoured arms, and a tail that wept green fluid into the ash.

The first one walked into my web and did not come apart. It took several more steps before it collapsed into pieces. I had not put any more power into the lines. I had been pushing Sharpen into them with my Inscription Pen for a while now, alongside a great many other Scripts, and this was only the beginning.

The Khaazim died slower than the Khaaz, and they died.

The crack in the earth widened, and fissures began to open in the air as well. I could feel everything inside the six miles of my web.