B5 Chapter 43

Once it was clear that the Proto Knights were doing fine without my help, I left to help the Spirit Knights. Crossing the valley, soaring through the air at top speed, I reached the battlefield in a moment.

Staring at the battlefield down below as well as the cloud of darkness spreading out in the distance, I flinched. For the cloud of darkness in the distance was none other than hundreds of winged Spawns of varying sizes. Down below, the Spirit Knights were dealing with an equally tough number of opponents.

Our only saving grace was likely that most Spawns weren’t stronger than Guardians and Overlords. While their Blessed equivalents were Masters and Grandmasters, which was the Rank I could fight against most comfortably, the Spirit Knights had it easier. Even the weakest of the Spirit Knights was comparable to a Ruler even if they did not use their Vowed power. Using the power of the Spirit they had made an oath with pushed their prowess even further.

That was how a small group of no less than two dozen old, almost ancient, Spirit Knights managed to survive. Two of them, other than Glacia’s Knight, were Emperors, which also included one of the Earthen Knights. While Razarn did not obey him like it did the Earthen Spirit, the Earthen Knights knew how to wield the earth and their tremendous power to bust Spawns efficiently.

They were killing machines, their experience as vast as humanity’s experience as Blessed, and their sole goal was to exterminate the Spawns. That was commendable even if the destruction they caused was terrifying, to say the least. The ground beneath the Earthen Knight caved in with every step he took. Massive pillars ripped out of the ground and nearby mountain walls, crushing one Spawn after another. A small mountain coalesced above a group of a few dozen Spawns, and it squashed them effortlessly as it descended.

They too wielded the Aspect of Gravity, and their usage of it was much more profound as well.

But as exciting as it was to watch the monstrosities of Dracos fight and bash the nemesis of Razarn, I couldn’t help but shudder when the gaze of thousands flicked toward me. Even the Spawns engaged in combat with the Spirit Knights turned away, their gazes moving slowly toward me. The price they paid for that was heavy, paid in blood and death. Still, the eyes lingering on me, and the power I radiated while Soulfused with the Earthen Spirit, made me conscious of the situation I was in.

The Devourer was not a fool. He knew exactly who his greatest adversaries were. So he weakened them through the Fractures. At least, that was what Aureus and I had theorized. The Devourer wanted the Spirits to stagnate or grow weaker, just like he weakened the Primal Spirit or whatever was left of him. Killing members of the Spirit Guard Temple would weaken the Spirits even if only passively, but killing and consuming the wielder of a Primal Fragment as well as a young Spirit? That was something else entirely.

Aureus and I were fully aware of that, and we’d expected the Spawns to grow more conscious of our presence over the course of years. Clearly, we had been too generous. Either the Devourer had sensed the birth of the Earthen Spirit and prepared for it, or the Spawns were naturally perceptive enough to understand the value of everything they wanted to consume.

And, right now, they wanted to consume me. Their intentions were as clear as day and night, their greed and hunger unmistakable.

Putting the sensation aside, I dove straight into the next fight. Using Blink, the distance to one of the weaker groups of Spawns shrunk in a moment. The creatures attacked, their claws raking across my chest, but the earthen hue, created by raw spirit power, blocked most of the impact. The armor beneath the hue blocked the rest long enough to ram my spirit blade into their throat. A detonation of spirit power eradicated the Guardian-ranked Spawn in a moment.

The greed and hunger hanging in the air distorted momentarily, and it appeared almost like the Spawns regained their senses. But they failed to do anything when an earthen cage the size of a house formed around us. One of the Spawns struck the cage and bit into it, but it wouldn’t budge. Rather than damaging the cage, the Spawn reeled back in pain, courtesy of the spirit power infused in the cage.

Taking a deep breath, I focused more on Predator and teleported to the next opponent. Unleashing Paralyze with enough spirit power to overclock the trait, my next target froze up in place. It failed to move in time to stop the spirit blade coated in Annihilation Blade. The Spawn died as quickly as its brethren, and the others would have joined it if not for the heavy presence weighing down on me.

The earthen cage crumbled as the new presence descended. The Spawns let out shrill screams and pulled away as fast as they could, but they were too slow to escape the dark-blue shadow that passed through them. One moment, the Spawns reeled back unscathed, and in the next only fractions of their bodies remained. Bite marks were all that remained where the rest of their bodies had once been.

As for the source of the Spawns’ terror, it was yet another terror. The strongest Spawn I had seen so far, one of the kind that ate even its own brethren to grow stronger. That, at least, was how it looked through Lifesight. Swallowing the Spawns it had eaten, the Monarch’s mass of nothingness grew. Not by much, but enough for me to note.

Fuck. I thought, ready to use Blink to disappear right at once.

A Monarch-ranked Spawn was definitely not something I could handle, especially not one that felt as ancient as the one towering before me. It resembled a warg at first glance, but it was far larger than those pesky creatures. It was more than ten meters in height and twice the length. Muscles rippled beneath the blue, shadowy aura oozing from its body. Making eye contact with the Spawn made me feel sluggish. Like my mind was having more trouble thinking.

Even the simplest of thoughts came to me with much greater difficulty, which resulted in a heavy gash spreading across my chest as soon as it attacked. It emerged before me in the air and clawed at me. While the attack itself looked nonchalant in ways I couldn’t comprehend, it was fast and deadly.

Aureus and I barely had time to put up our defense when the Spawn’s razor-sharp claws carved through it. Pain blossomed in my chest and blood spurted. Moving hurt, but I knew I had to move to escape the next strike. But when I tried to move away, I felt a force pulling me closer to the Spawn’s claws.

Summoning the Earthen Aspect and Gravity Aspect alongside Aureus, I created a massive, highly compressed aegis shield between us, but that too was severed with ease. I tried to counterattack, following a momentary distraction, but as soon as the spirit blade was about to connect with the Spawn’s leg, it was pushed away with tremendous force.

Unsure what to do, I followed my instincts and tried to twist my way out of the tail swinging my way, yet another pull dragged me right into it. It connected with my rib cage, which shattered in a cacophony of cracking noises that rang in my ears. I screamed out in pain as I was flung through the air.

The Spawn’s tail strike appeared as simple as its claw strikes, yet the power behind it rocketed me into the ground with tremendous force. A crater formed around me, which only made me groan again. Nectar and life-attuned mana streamed through the weave and my body, knitting me back together as quickly as possible, but my foe did not wait for me to recover.

Push and Pull. I had never heard of a trait, or possibly two traits, as powerful as those. Redirection was a trait I was familiar with, but whatever beast the Monarch Spawn had defeated had to have been powerful. If it hadn’t, the pushing and pulling force wouldn’t have felt like godlike traits. I couldn’t even do anything about them.

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Then there were those damn eyes that made my mind sluggish. The Spawn appeared before me in a flash, its claws raised to end me, but I made eye contact with the creature and triggered Paralyze.

Empowering the trait with both my spirit power and Aureus’s should have been more than enough to freeze creatures as powerful as the Monarch Spawn, yet it almost felt like Paralyze’s effect was thrown back at me. The only reason I survived was Aureus’s complete control of the surrounding earth.

He shifted the soil around and underneath me to pull me away from the Spawn. That worked, but only once. Before I knew it, a lightning bolt shot toward me, zapping me badly. Burn marks spread across my chest, ripping the claw marks wide open once again. Then came a sphere of death. It formed in the Spawn’s maw in the blink of an eye, and the Spawn hurled it at me with the same velocity.

I tried to use Blink to get out, but the spatial distortions failed me. They materialized around me only to fade away. A black, spinning orb of death came for my head, and all I could do was summon the toughest material from the depths of Razarn. It cost us dearly, but as the orb of death tore through the earthen wall, I managed to leap to the side, escaping death by a hair.

Unfortunately, that was not even the worst of it. Once Sapsie managed to knit together the worst of the wounds, I tried to counter the Spawn, only to realize that my foe had a trait resembling Predator as well. It was just that the trait was… stronger?

No, it did not necessarily have to be stronger, but it felt like the Monarch Spawn was more in tune with itself. It could easily incorporate the Predator-like trait into its already superior power and mental capacity. Its reaction speed was superior to mine, it was stronger, and it moved with the speed of a physical-aspected Monarch. That was not something I could handle just yet. Not alone, that is… and I was not alone. Never had been and never would be.

Earthen spikes tore out of the ground just as its claws raked across my chest again. The wounds burned badly, and I felt something insidious seep into me, but I trusted Sapsie would handle it. Putting aside the pain and discomfort, I focused on evading the worst attacks, turning them into mild injuries at worst.

That didn’t turn out quite as well as I had hoped, but at least we managed to counterattack. The Earthen Spirit called upon Razarn’s greatest power while I struggled desperately to stay alive. The earthen spikes he used to counterattack were perfectly concealed, even from a trait as powerful as Predator, especially when the spikes were coated in Annihilation Blade.

The shroud of Annihilation Blade gave the spikes the sharpness needed to puncture the Spawn’s tough hide, and a mountain of spirit power was driven into the grotesque creature to weaken it. That worked, to a certain extent. It enraged the creature enough to stop playing around and prepare for a killing blow.

But it never got to that. Not because I somehow managed to pass through the spatial blockade the Spawn had erected or because I was strong enough to escape. No, the only thing I did was stall for time and send signals to the other Spirit Knights, hoping they would find the time to give me a helping hand.

The cold that seeped into my skin may not have been the answer I wanted, but it was what I needed most. Glacia’s Knight emerged by my side, the air around him freezing cold. Not even my spirit fire was strong enough to cast aside the coldness that infiltrated my body.

“You did decent enough. I understand their interest in your power,” Glacia’s Knight grunted, eyes narrowed at the Monarch Spawn as it used Push and Pull to redirect the Knight’s attack while executing one of its own. “But you are still young. Leave this to your elders.”

I wanted to retort, saying that I had everything under control, but who was I kidding? I had nothing under control. Fighting a few dozen younger Spawns was fine. Maybe even a few aged Spawns with hundreds of powerful traits at their disposal would be fine to handle. An ancient Monarch Spawn, on the other hand, was still a little too much for me.

I shot to my feet as quickly as my body allowed, ready to support the other Spirit Knights in the fight against the Guardian and Overlord Spawns, but as a blizzard of ice burst from Glacia’s Knight’s sword, I slowed.

“Help that frail Divination Soul while you’re at it,” he grunted, shoving the Monarch Spawn away.

The spatial blockade around me dropped, and I teleported further away from the Monarch Spawn, which let out a tortured screech. The left side of the valley transformed into a freezing-cold region shrouded in a blizzard, massive lightning bolts, and orbs of death that were torn apart by the blizzard’s shrapnel.

The blizzard expanded, and so did the heavy presences within it, showing me that I had been mistaken.

The Spawn I had fought hadn’t been a regular Monarch. It had been something much grander. Something strong enough to face Glacia’s Knight head-on. Even if only momentarily.

“Divination Soul?” I muttered in confusion and turned away from the battlefield. Sapsie was still knitting my body together, but I felt good enough to glance around and use Lifesight. And there it was—an oddity. A frequency of life that clearly shouldn’t have been in the epicenter of the lands of nothingness.

Isn’t that...?

Aureus gaped, confirming that I hadn’t just gone insane.

No time wasted, I teleported a dozen times across the lands of nothingness. Hundreds of Spawns crossed the lands to head toward the Spirit Knights and Proto Knights, their battlelust and greed ever-present, yet I didn’t stop. My attention lingered in the distance. My target grew more and more detailed, which was not particularly difficult. How could I miss the divine energy, the vibrant silver aura, in the middle of nothingness?

Continuing to use Blink, I drained my reserves much faster than anticipated, but that hardly mattered. Not when, shrouded in divine light, sat a human holding a Spawn marble that reeked of greed and gluttony.

I didn’t know how I knew what greed and gluttony smelled like, but I just knew, and so did my World.

But even when my World trembled and thrashed around, screaming at me to do something, I just stood there, staring blankly at the familiar face that looked up at me with a vibrant but also worn-out expression.

Scott. Wielder of the largest World I knew, both blessed and cursed with the power of divination, sat there before me, acting like we weren’t in the middle of the Devourer’s territory. Or that he wasn’t holding a terrifying, pulsating version of the Spawn marble Zegrath and I had fought a while ago.

“Where the fuck have you been?” I blurted out. He had gone missing after the fight with Raffael Torch. I half-expected Volca to have forgotten about Scott. That the Fire Spirit didn’t bring him with us to Dracos. But was that really the case?

So many questions flashed through my mind, but before I could ask any more of them, Scott’s lips parted.

“Took you long enough.” He chuckled, blood running down the corner of his lips. His eyes turned milky-white, and his smile grew wider. “Aureus evolved to a Spirit? Oh, and Coco already advanced as well? Makes sense why it took you so long.”

“Anyway.” Scott stared back at me with his milky-white eyes. “You still do have to do something for me.”

He held out the pulsing Spawn marble, which only grew more aggressive as the divine light shrouding Scott faded away. “I need you to bind this. It took me quite a while to find one ferocious and… unstable enough, but that one should work.”

I could almost feel the Spawn marble transform into something else. It was like the Spawn had razor-sharp teeth that would devour everything in its path. Myself, my World, and my Soulkins included... as well as other Spawns.

“Do I have to? What if it doesn’t work?” I couldn’t help but ask even as my World shook tremendously. My bonds trembled, and the golden particles of soul energy stirred. They moved toward my palm in an attempt to escape my fleshly body just so they could bind the Spawn marble.

Is that really what you want? Are you sure? I asked the World, knowing that it would never respond with words.

“If it doesn’t work, you’re dead.” Scott smiled confidently. “We’re all dead if this one doesn’t work.”

That didn’t sound ominous at all, yet Scott’s words rang true in my mind. The World agreed, so did Aureus and the others. We’d talked about this extensively, but I never thought it would really get this far.

Was that what Volca wanted? Was that what had to be done to deal with the Devourer once and for all?

“Don’t worry, I am not wrong.”

That was the last I heard before golden tendrils burst from my palm. My World had made a decision for me, and I wasn’t even mad at it. Binding a Spawn was the right decision. But whether it was a good decision to bind a Spawn marble that felt almost sentient, one that radiated even more hunger than the Monarch Spawn, I couldn’t tell.

Just go with the flow.

Aureus chuckled, but the Earthen Spirit sounded as uncertain as I felt. Not that it mattered, as a fragile bond of soulshare formed between the ferocious Spawn marble and my World.

There was no changing it now. It was either do or die, and I wasn’t willing to die anytime soon.

[End of Volume 5]