Chapter 489: A Feast of Cores (Bonus PS)

More of the Khaazim kept coming in their hundreds and died in the hundreds. I could see their eyes darting about in search of whatever was killing them, and my threads were invisible, since I had cloaked them with Lightning Edict, so the only thing they saw was my glowing form standing in the air above.

I stopped paying attention to them before the first thousand was dead. They had no way to reach me at this distance, and their bodies were not durable enough to tear through my threads. They were no threat. With that in mind, I went back to writing Scripts.

As I wove my spell, I gained inspiration and a deeper understanding of my own magic. I shut off everything but the essence notifications so I would not be distracted while I worked.

I had mile after mile of threads, and all of them needed to be used. I imagined that if I were a full Sovereign with a Grimoire, I could do all of this inside it and release it at once, and there was nothing wrong with expanding my knowledge and getting better at my craft in the meantime.

∞

In the past I had to write Scripts through pain, and what I created had been spectacular, though there I had days to write, and here I had minutes. Still, my soul was complete, I was stronger than I had ever been, and I was full of ideas.

As always, I started simply. I used Sharpen first, since my Inscription Pen was literally made from that Law. Every thread in my web drank the Script, and I could feel the hundreds of pieces of feedback it gave me as the Khaazim walked through the threads and fell apart.

Every corpse I made with that power taught me something deeper about the Script. It was a grim thing to be learning. Someone called me a Battlemage once, and if killing was going to be my bread and butter, then I had to be the best at making it.

Sharpen was doing its work, so I experimented with another Script, Hold, placing it across certain vertical lines so those threads stopped cutting what touched them and kept it instead, and before long three hundred Khaaz hung in the air in a grid like beads on a loom while the ones behind them walked underneath and died.

I looked at that for a moment and confirmed how much weight my threads could hold and how much power it took, and then I let them drop and cut them on the way down. The Script was wasted on these, and it would matter later.

I kept experimenting like that, testing one Script after another while building an overarching working underneath all of it. The battlefield was my best teacher.

Some of the experiments were destructive to the web, and I patched those portions quickly. Others worked better than I expected, and the Transport threads came out of one of them, drawing what the web killed up through the lattice to me instead of leaving it in the ash.

[ Stored Essence: 913,187 → 913,602 ]

∞

[ Warning... Third Seal Loosened. ]

The note came out of the pyramid lower than the first, and the words wrote themselves across the inside of my eyes. As the Warden of the Caelith, even without linking to it yet, I was receiving far more information than before.

The second seal was the one that brought the Narghul Sorcerers. Two-horned first, then three-horned as more seals loosened.

The fissures around me began to widen much faster than before, and cracks in space started opening in midair, directly inside my web. I put my hand flat and the web went still, every thread holding, six miles of lightning and Scripts waiting on my command.

"Finally," I said. "Something worth writing about."

Inside my soul, the flames of Soul-Forge were waking. My channels and Cor Telluris were about to feed on these sorcerers, and I could not wait for the feast to begin.

The world was painted red above me, and below me was ash and fire, and it was in that hell of my own making that hundreds of new fissures opened in the air. I could feel them clearly with my Space Resonance, and for a moment the desire to push through one and see what was truly on the other side flashed across my mind, and I held the instinct back. There would be time for that later.

Hundreds of them appeared, scattered across my web like cracks in a frozen lake. A pale light bled through them, which I could only see with my Space Resonance, and I did not look too deeply. Knowing Eldritch Perception and its bad timing, I would not have been surprised if it dragged me off into a new mystery.

The first two-horned Sorcerer came through a seam directly into my web. He came through upside down, and I cocked my head in surprise. Perhaps the dimension on that side was stranger than I thought.

This was the demon that had given me nightmares that nearly broke my mind and my soul. It barely saw the world before my web killed it.

The threads closed on him the way a hand closes on a fly. He had time to scream once, and then he was in pieces, and the pieces were in pieces, and through the threads I took his core and his Flame Essence, and as they flowed towards me along the Transport threads I ran Soul-Forge across them, and they were purified into nourishment for Cor Telluris.

My channels were complete. They could not be added to, and they could be reinforced. Every demon core I fed to Cor Telluris made them a little thicker, a little stronger, a little more capable of holding the power I was going to need.

The ocean was already full. I was making the ocean deeper.

The second two-horned Sorcerer came through a seam ten metres to my left, and he saw me. For a moment his four red eyes widened in shock. I was a blue sun in the shape of a man, and that was the last thing he saw.

He was one of the few lucky ones who saw me before dying, though my presence could have been felt by a blind man, from the sheer weight of the Anima coming off me.

The third Sorcerer came through, and the fourth, and the fifth. One at a time, then in pairs, then in groups of five and six, and every one of them died quickly. The threads killed them before they could orient themselves, and the Transport threads brought their cores to me, and Soul-Forge burned them into fuel for my channels.

In that same stretch, hundreds of thousands of Khaaz and Khaazim died, and a brief notification flashed across my vision.

[ Stored Essence: 913,602 → 914,187 ]

I settled into a rhythm, killing them as they came. It was almost automatic by then. The first two seals were warm-ups. From the third, things began to get interesting, because the three-horned Sorcerers would start to emerge.

I looked at the threads that reached up to the clouds, and I was sure I could snag every single thing that entered my web. Space here was too fragile for any of the three-horned to use their domains, and even if they had demonic spells, my threads had hardly begun to show their true might.

I would not let them know what hit them.

Any time now...

[ Warning... Third Seal Loosened. ]