Chapter 28: Black Rune Structure

The phantom of the Comet-Gem Mantis reappeared behind Nathan—but this time the bloodborn insect had transformed. Its formerly emerald carapace had turned a deep, dark ink-green, its body taller and more vicious by far, pushing seventeen feet, with a faint tinge of crazed, demonic wildness to it.

Sebastian's brow knitted. "How can you possibly control my Comet-Gem Mantis?"

Nathan licked his lips. "Beats me! But you're a dead man walking—knowing wouldn't do you any good anyway. Don't hurt yourself thinking about it."

Of course Nathan wasn't about to tell Sebastian that the Titan Godslayer Canon's Star-Swallowing Form didn't just devour living things—it assimilated them. While the Star-Swallowing Form had assimilated his own body, it had swallowed the Comet-Gem Mantis right along with it. Back when Sebastian had barked the order for the Comet-Gem Mantis to seal his vitae, Nathan had already discovered the war-beast was long past taking Sebastian's orders.

The only reason Nathan had kept his cool back then was that he wanted the spell for taking human form. After being put through the wringer by Sebastian for this long, and getting his whole family threatened with slaughter on top of it, no one would believe he didn't want the man dead.

The script had veered way past anything Sebastian imagined. The Order of the Deathless acolyte had never dreamed that a newborn bloodborn, freshly awakened like Nathan, would slip out of his grip—every one of his plans torn up, his mind churning nonstop over how to handle this brand-new situation.

Feeling the vitae surging lush and vigorous through his body, Nathan was in a fantastic mood!

Even with the Comet-Gem Mantis's Tier-Two deployment unlocked, it still couldn't convert all of his vitae—but it could now easily drive past three thousand, five or six times stronger than its Tier-One state.

He heh-hehed at Sebastian: "The vitae your Comet-Gem Mantis converts has a ceiling. That ceiling had me convinced I was pathetically weak—scared to death of you. Now I know my strength was never that bad. It's even... enough to kill you!"

The corners of Sebastian's mouth pressed together, half-smile, half-sneer: "You want to kill me? A little premature!"

He traced a sigil, and a pitch-black maw of a hole yawned open in the stone wall, generating a monstrous suction. The pull hauled Nathan right up off the ground.

A flutter of panic ran through Nathan, and he shouted: "You're trying to shove me into the abandoned Between?"

Sebastian laughed without a sound and said, low and hard: "Exactly! I've got a hundred ways to deal with you, but this one's the simplest and the easiest!" He shoved hard with both arms, and the black hole's swallowing force spiked dozens of times over. Nathan threw everything into ramping his vitae and still couldn't counter it—dragged bodily into the black hole.

Pitched into the passage by Sebastian, all Nathan could do was drive the Titan Godslayer Canon. Black-light vitae broke out of his body, his whole person becoming a mass of black aether—black-light vitae could pass through anything, and there was no better protection than that.

In a single instant, dozens of objects passed clean through Nathan's body one after another. Gone in a flash though they were, he still made them out: the things punching through him were "chunks" of every kind of bloodborn beast. Clearly this passage was nowhere near safe.

A few minutes later, everything outside him suddenly went light, and he came wriggling out of a different black hole. The landscape before his eyes was utterly strange—he was obviously no longer on Elderrow.

Sebastian's voice came barking out of the black hole: "For the next twenty-four hours, I'll open the Between once every hour. Bring me the Phantomveil Vine and I'll let you out. If you're not back in twenty-four hours, there won't be enough of you left for me to collect." The words had barely landed when the black hole in the stone wall went whoosh—vanished without a trace.

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Nathan's vitae was a little scrambled, the scenery around him left him half-dazed, and Sebastian's words made his situation crystal clear.

Grousing to himself, pretty deflated: "Still too green. If I'd set that ambush up a little sneakier, I might just have taken the villain out." He was far from satisfied with how his gambit had gone.

Nathan's eyes swept around. Before him stretched an unfamiliar grassland, covered everywhere with a strange pale-gold wild grass—stems straight as arrows, bearing only a few decorative leaves at the very top. This pale-gold grass grew taller than a grown man, bolt upright without a lean or a tilt, its tips gleaming with a metallic sheen, looking for all the world like wild-grown lances.

Curious, Nathan grabbed one and gave it a casual yank—didn't break. A second try didn't either. Only on the third, with eighty percent of his strength behind it, did the tall grass snap with a crack. This pale-gold wild grass was seriously tough—probably sturdier than the shafts ancient spears were made of.

Nathan turned the broken pale-gold grass tip-down and stabbed it hard into the ground—and it sank nearly a foot and a half into the dirt in one go. The sharpness of this weird grass's tips also blew past his expectations.

Something stirred in Nathan's chest. He drove the Star-Swallowing Form, and eight streams of black-light vitae broke out of his body, writhing like monstrous pythons, instantly generating that vast devouring force.

Under the Star-Swallowing Form's power, whole swaths of the abandoned Between's land, pale-gold grass and all, kept blinking out of existence, baring the rock ground beneath the soil, black and hard as iron. The earth Nathan had swallowed into his black-light vitae, once run through the Star-Swallowing Form's assimilation, gradually stitched itself into one continuous patch inside the black-light heart-seed—and from that patch of land vast sheets of the grass came drilling up out of the ground, its life-force seemingly even lusher than outside, growing thicker and denser, only somewhat darker in color, turned to dark gold.

Before you could blink, a bank of black cloud soared up, and countless black beetles dropped onto the dark-gold grass and started gorging, crunch-crunch-crunch filling the air.

These black beetles' life-forms had mutated: shells darker and deeper than the originals, bodies a full size bigger. In mere moments they had grazed an entire field of the dark-gold grass down to nothing.

Nathan drove the Titan Godslayer Canon, and everything inside the black-light heart-seed, in his eyes, reverted to its origin—its essence laid bare.

Whether the broad stretch of land, the dark-gold grass, or the black beetles, at root they were all just masses of black-light vitae—each simply carrying a different structure of black runes. It was precisely those black rune structures that made them take different shapes.

"So this is the Titan Godslayer Canon's greatest secret? It can actually assimilate all things, then re-create them out of vitae..."

One black beetle, as if it had received a summons, lifted off the dark-gold grass, passed through Nathan's body, and hovered before his eyes.

Nathan gave it a casual pinch, and the beetle burst into a rolling mass of black light. A moment later the light congealed and became a black beetle again—aura a touch weaker, but otherwise indistinguishable from before.

Nathan made a casual grab, and a cluster of black runes flew out of the black beetle's body.

This time the black beetle couldn't hold itself together at all—it burst into a mass of black light, and like attracting like, drifted toward Nathan's body, melted into the vitae on him, and was utterly annihilated from this world.