Chapter 4: Devour

Koda sat over the drained husk of the insectoid for a long time, flexing his claws as he watched the warmth still humming faintly behind his ribs.

The exhaustion that had nearly buckled his legs an hour ago was completely gone. Wiped clean, as if it had never existed at all. His muscles felt loose and ready in a way they hadn’t since he’d woken up choking on black dirt, and the gnawing hollowness that had driven him out here in the first place had dulled considerably.

’That mist did this,’ he thought, turning his palm over to study the faint traces of dried green blood still crusted between his claws. ’Whatever it was, it’s unbelievable.

He wanted to do it again. On purpose, this time.

Closing his eyes, Koda reached inward, trying to find whatever had reached out on its own back at the ravine. For a better chance, he pictured the warmth spreading through his limbs and willed it to happen again, straining with a focus that made his temples ache.

But nothing happened.

He tried harder again, fists clenched and jaw locked tight enough to hurt himself. Yet, still nothing. He didn’t feel the familiar warmth or pull flaring back to life behind his ribs. Just an insectoid corpse, drained and empty, and a demon crouched over it looking, he was fairly sure, deeply stupid.

’Okay. So it doesn’t just respond to me wanting it.’ He sat back on his haunches, his frustration curdling into something more useful: a question. ’The mist hadn’t come when I’d willed for it just now. But it had appeared when the creature died. So that means it only appears or responds when something living had died, right?’

’It’s definitely tied to the kill,’ he thought slowly.

Moving on to better test his theory, Koda found a demon rat half an hour later. It was wedged in the lee of a boulder along a narrow trail cut between two black outcrops.

It was already dead, or close enough... it seems.

Probably some other predator had gotten to it first; half its body was simply gone, the wound was cauterized black at the edges, and what remained had the gray, sunken look of a carcass that had been lying there for a while.

Koda crouched beside it anyway, his curiosity outweighing the faint disgust still lingering from his first kill.

Pressing a claw against the ruined hide, he focused not outward this time, but inward; toward that same deep hollow feeling in his chest that had been screaming with hunger only hours before.

Surprisingly, a faint vacuum sensation sparked within his body.

A thread of dark mist; thin and almost apologetic compared to the one from the Insectoid, lifted off the rat’s ruined body and drifted into his waiting palm.

It sank into his scales the same way as before, quiet and fast, but the warmth that followed barely did much this time. It was a candle flicker compared to what the insectoid had given him.

’It’s way smaller this time around,’ he thought, frowning down at the carcass. But thinking about it further, Koda realised that it made a kind of sense once he turned it over in his head.

This thing had obviously been dead for a while already, picked at, with most of whatever it had once carried already dispersed out into the ground or air.

Freshness mattered.

Maybe even more than freshness; maybe the fight itself, the life still burning right up until the moment it stopped, mattered more than the body left behind afterward.

’There’s a difference between killing something and killing something well,’ he thought, and he didn’t much like how naturally the realization arrived.

As he was deep in his thoughts, something suddenly stirred within his consciousness as he crouched beside the rat’s corpse.

It came on slowly at first, like a memory surfacing or being unlocked. A primordial, ancient sensation bloomed within his body, spreading through his chest, his skull, and down into the marrow of bones that weren’t even human anymore.

Oddly, the memories he just awakened didn’t feel like learning something new. It felt like remembering memories of old, that had always belonged to him and had simply been dormant. Until the mysterious mist somehow awakened it.

Within his mind, an ancient name surfaced; The Devouring Origin.

It wasn’t a spell or a gift handed down by some god. It felt like something imprinted into the very core of his soul.

The Devouring Origin was a heaven defying ability used to absorb the residual essence of the dead, regardless of their form; Infernal, Divine, or Spiritual, and fuel the growth of his own power and existence with it.

It could absorb their essence and whatever was left of them once the fighting stopped and the life finally went out.

Koda understood the significance of what he’d just learnt, and the horror he expected to feel never came. What arrived instead was indifference... coldness and far more terrifying ambitious thoughts than he would’ve ever dared to have.

Koda spent the next few hours testing this ability of his.

A thick venomous Rock Snake, coiled and sluggish in the shadow of a boulder, struck at him twice before he caught it behind the skull and ended it fast.

His claws drove down through the snake’s scale and into whatever passed for a its spine. He reached for the essence the moment it stopped moving, deliberately this time.

He began searching for that vacuum sensation of the Devouring Origin, instead of waiting for it to begin absorbing on its own. He wanted to be able to control it at will.

Moments later, he felt a thin thread lift free and sink into his palm. He succeeded in absorbing the essence of the Rock Snake. But since it was a normal beast, its essence wasn’t of much use to him.

Koda continued his hunt, killing two more beasts. Though, it wasn’t easy finding lone beast around here, especially one that was weak. As most beasts in the wasteland preferred to move in groups of twos or more, to better protect themselves from predators.

One of them was a Spiky-hound Crawler. When Koda spotted it, it was moving low and fast on too many legs.

Unexpectedly, it put up more of a fight than the Rock Snake, catching him across the ribs multiple times before he managed to pin it and finish the job.

He successfully absorbed its essence the same way. Though, it was just another small gain, barely useful than the Rock Snake.

The second beast was a Scav-fly Bat.

Since it was a flying beast, it took the longest for Koda to kill.

It was darting and wheeling above him in erratic loops before he finally knocked it out of the air with a lucky tail swipe and finished it against the rock. Its essence, when he drew it out and absorbed it, felt barely useful than both of the others. Just whisper above, compared to that first insectoid.

By the time the three kills lay behind him, Koda sat back against a boulder and took stock of what he’d actually gained.

It was not much.

The ember behind his ribs that was the source of his ability, burned a little brighter than before, sure, but it was nowhere near the leap he’d felt after that first kill.

Three separate fights, three separate deaths, and together they’d barely matched what one solid meal had given him back at the ravine.

’Quantity isn’t the way to go when using the Devouring Origin ability,’ he thought with a slight frown on his face, turning the lesson over carefully. ’What really matters is it’s quality... The quality of the essence I absorb determines how useful it’ll turn out.’

Killing weak beasts for scraps of essence was a slow, exhausting way to grow stronger. He’d need more powerful essences if he wanted to actually grow into something that even the beings of Hell couldn’t casually erase.

Unknowingly, he had arrived in front of a ledge by accident. He paused for a while, then continued after much deliberation, following the trail up a steep rise of black stone until the ground fell away in front of him into a wide, smoke-hazed valley.

Below, crimson stalks grew thick into something closer to a grove. Their twisting red trunks rose twenty feet or more into the haze. It was an interesting sight to behold.

Smashing through them and uprooting them like a plow through soft earth, was something massively intimidating. It was armored in thick gray plates from skull to tail and was easily the size of a small house, with four clawed legs driving it forward through the grove with a strength that splintered the surrounding wood and stone alike.

Koda’s first instinct was the same one that had kept him alive so far: freeze, go quiet, don’t be seen, run away...

But that cowardly feeling faded fast, chased out by newfound confidence from the previous kills.

He crouched at the edge of the ledge, watching the beast tear through the grove below, and felt no paralyzing terror this time. No frantic urge to run and hide in the nearest crack in the rock.

What he felt instead, was a little frightening in its own right; to kill and devour the beast’s essence.