Chapter 30: Advancements

"Does everybody become that strong after advancing to a Bronze Core?" I asked Eliza.

"It depends on a person’s affinity," she said, tapping her chin as if the question deserved more thought than it probably did. "Mine, for example, is Spatial. It has no offensive capability right now, but it lets me teleport small objects, cast minor illusions, and see roughly three seconds into the future. Once I advance to a Silver Core, I will be able to teleport myself through my Traveler’s Door, and a great deal more besides, I imagine."

"Yeah," I said, "your ability sounds kind of useless."

The slap that followed was not gentle.

"Even so," Theodore said, rubbing the back of his neck, "I never expected Edmund here to turn into a powerhouse right when we needed one. I thought he was strong, but not like that."

"Me neither," Mary said, which, coming from her, might as well have been an entire speech.

"You are all just flattering me," I said, feeling heat crawl up my neck despite myself.

"In any case," Eliza went on, folding her arms, "you will be able to consume the Characteristics of Beasts and Ferals and become Awakened yourself, in time. Who knows. Perhaps you will end up stronger than I am."

’I sincerely hope not,’ I thought, though I kept the thought to myself.

Theodore and Arthur exchanged a look, the kind of look boys give each other when they are trying not to appear as pleased as they actually are. I could not blame them. An hour ago we had all been fighting for our lives against a Yangereu and its pack of Suaps. Now we were standing in the aftermath, breathing, whole, and apparently about to get stronger for it.

It was Theodore who noticed first.

"Is that not a little too fast?" he said, nodding toward the corpses scattered across the churned ground.

I followed his gaze. The bodies of the Yangereu and the Suaps were already decaying, turning to ash at a rate that had no business being natural. I had seen corpses rot before. This was not rot. This was erasure.

All four of us turned, almost in unison, toward the one thing in this cursed place large enough to explain anything.

The Enormous Black Spire.

It was trembling, the way a tower trembles right before it forgets how to be a tower, as though something inside it had been drained past the point where it could hold its own shape.

I looked back at the corpses. Their Characteristics had already surfaced, faster than I had ever seen one surface before, and a theory assembled itself in my head almost without my permission.

"Maybe the Spire is doing something to time itself," I said. "Making it move faster than it should, here around it."

Eliza considered this for a moment, then nodded slowly.

"That is the most reasonable explanation I can think of," she said. "Quickly, everyone, eat the Characteristics of the Ferals. Five per person, since one Feral Characteristic makes one star. And remember, stay in a state of cogitation while you do it."

Theodore and Arthur did not need to be told twice. They knelt over the ash-streaked ground, gathered what remained, and swallowed the Characteristics down one after another, their faces tight with concentration, the way a person looks when they are trying very hard not to feel anything at all.

Arthur was the first to break the silence, and he did it the way Arthur broke most silences: loudly.

"Woah! I feel absurdly strong! Look at this!"

A vine erupted from his palm, thorned and glistening, and struck a nearby Suap corpse hard enough to lift it clean off the ground. He stared at his own hand as though it belonged to someone else.

"I can harden my skin like wood," he said, turning his arm over, inspecting it. "Manipulate the vines in the environment, regenerate minor wounds, and draw a small amount of vitality from an enemy."

"Interesting," Theodore said, though he did not sound half as impressed as the word suggested. A moment later I understood why. He held up his own hand and, with a small, private smile, said, "I can manipulate my flesh to some degree, work with blood for casting, harden my bones, form temporary flesh, regenerate damaged tissue, and sense the life force and condition of any living thing nearby."

"Would you like to see it?" he asked.

"Of course," I said, and I meant it. Out of everything the two of them had described, his abilities sounded the most unsettling, which, in the Realm of the Evil, usually meant the most useful.

He raised his thumbnail toward the tip of his index finger, ready to draw the first drop of blood that would prove his words.

That was when the ground shook.

Not the trembling of a wounded Spire this time, but something far larger, far angrier, moving beneath our feet as though the earth itself had decided it no longer wished to hold us up.

Above us, the clouds convulsed and spat violent lightning down onto the land, again and again, while the earthquake refused to stop.

"Grab the two Beast Characteristics! We need to run, now!" Eliza shouted.

Arthur’s vine, still curled around the fallen Suap, whipped back on instinct, or perhaps on his will alone, and dragged the two Beast Characteristics through the mud toward his open palm.

Bam!

Lightning fell close enough that I felt the heat of it against my cheek.

"That is not good! Run, fast!"

We ran, all five of us, toward the landmark with everything our legs had left to give, while the ground beneath us shuddered with a violence that no earthquake back on Earth could have matched, not even the worst of them.

I did not yet know what was coming for us.

I only knew, somewhere in the part of my mind that still remembered fear even after everything I had survived so far, that it was going to be worse than anything we had faced tonight.