Chapter 1460: Apex

It came out of the hall on all fours, and then it stood up.

Northern had to tip his head back to follow it. It was a Forest Hunter the way a mountain is a hill. It had the same long limbs and the same lean, corded body, but it stood four times the height of the Hunters around it, and its skin was no longer dusk-blue.

Age had turned it grey, the grey of old bark, and it had cracked like old bark too. Deep fissures ran down its chest and arms, with moss growing in them. Along its ribs, on both sides, long slits opened and closed as it breathed, and out of every one of them came the mist.

Its eyes were golden, like the others, and very old, and clouded over at the edges like a blind man’s. They were not blind. They found Northern on top of his heap at once and stayed there.

The ranks of the Hunters parted for it without a sound.

Northern let Shingan look.

Inside, it was nothing like the others. It had the same six soul cores as every Hunter in the valley, but theirs had been candles.

These were a furnace, banked low and very hot, older than anything he had seen since he came north, and brighter than Vanessa’s by a wide margin. And around it, faint as frost on glass, Thread Flow showed him something else.

Threads. Thousands upon thousands of them, thinner than spider silk, running out of the great grey body in every direction, through the mist, to every single Hunter in the valley.

He followed a few of them with his eyes. Every one ended in a Hunter’s head.

’...Ah. So you’re the one who’s been asking the questions.’

The Apex came for him.

It did not climb the heap. It did not need to. It took two long strides across the valley floor, reached up, and swept one enormous arm across the top of the pile of dead like a man clearing a table. Northern went over the arm with the Cadence still singing in his blades, came down on the far side, and cut it on the way past. Once, twice, seven times in the space of a breath.

The seventh stroke should have gone to the core.

Instead, the Apex moved its arm a hand’s breadth to the left at exactly the moment the seventh stroke landed, and the blade went into nothing.

Northern landed, turned, and stared up at it.

It struck again, and he cut again, and again the first six strokes went in and the seventh met empty air. He tried it a third time just to be sure. The Apex took six cuts along its forearm without flinching, and on the seventh, it simply was not there.

’It’s counting.’

He laughed out loud, and still could not hear it.

It was counting his strokes. All morning it had been watching him through the eyes of every Hunter it had ever sent at him, all eleven thousand of them, and somewhere in that great old head it had learned that his seventh stroke was the one that killed. So it gave him the first six. It could afford the first six.

He tried Recoil next. The Apex had watched that too.

It stopped striking him hard. It struck him lightly and often, from every direction, enough to bleed him and never enough to feed the talent anything worth spending. It reached out with the mist from its ribs and tried to smother him in it.

Then it stamped on the ground, and three thousand Hunters threw their spears together. Northern had to scatter himself into afterimages to meet them, and all the while the grey giant stepped carefully around his ghosts, as if it already knew which one was real.

Northern fell back up the heap, breathing hard, and looked at it.

It stood at the foot of the pile of its own dead, watching him with those clouded golden eyes. It was not in a hurry. It had never been in a hurry. It had waited two hundred years at the edge of the Empire’s forest, and it had all the time in the world to learn him.

’Then let’s stop you learning.’

He stopped looking at the Apex. He looked at the threads.

Soul Thread had many uses. Most of them Northern had barely touched in months, and he had honestly forgotten, for a while, how many ways there were to cut a thing that was not made of flesh. The threads running out of the Apex were not flesh. They were a connection, and connections could be severed.

He did not bother making it pretty.

Thread Severance left him in a single sideways stroke of his hand, like a man brushing a cobweb off his sleeve, and every thread between the Apex and its children parted at once.

The valley shuddered.

It was not a sound, because Windless still held the valley and nothing in it could make one. It was more like the feeling of a great rope snapping somewhere far below the ground. Three thousand Forest Hunters jerked where they stood, all together, and then stopped being together.

They looked at each other. They looked at their spears. They looked around at the valley and the ice walls and the heap of their dead and the grey giant standing in the middle of it, and Northern watched their golden eyes go wide and blank, like the eyes of any animal that has suddenly found itself alone in a place it does not understand.

They broke.

For the first time all day, the Forest Hunters ran. They ran in every direction at once, stumbling into each other, dropping their spears, clawing at the ice walls with their bare hands.

And the Apex, standing alone at the foot of the heap, turned its great head slowly from side to side, reaching for three thousand pairs of eyes that were no longer there.

It was just a very large, very old monster now.

Not all of them had broken. The four who had stood before the hall had not moved. They did not need a thread to tell them what to do, and they came up the heap at him together, fast and silent, with that grey weight rolling ahead of them. They were the strongest things he had fought all day.

Without the Apex counting for them, they were also just four.

He took them one at a time with the black blades, and on every seventh stroke, nothing in the valley moved aside.

[Your clone has slain Abysmal Destroyer - Forest Hunter]

[You have gained +18 talent fragments]

[...]

Northern stood up on top of his heap and let the black blades melt back into the shadows they had come from. He would not need them for what came next. There was nobody within fifty miles to see, and for this one thing, just this once, he wanted to use the talent he had carried north with him.

He raised his hand.

The Apex saw him do it. It could still see that much on its own. It opened its mouth, and every slit along its ribs opened with it, and it breathed out all the mist it had left in a single grey torrent.

Northern dropped his hand.

He did not throttle it at all.

One Strike came down out of a clear afternoon sky as a pillar of white so wide and so bright that the whole valley vanished inside it for one long heartbeat. The mist did not so much as slow it down.

It went through the grey torrent and through the Apex’s open mouth and through the great old furnace of its soul core, and out the other side into the frozen earth. Under the biggest tree in the valley, the ground split open like a dropped plate.

When the light faded, the Apex was still standing.

Then its knees folded, and it went down slowly, the way an old tree goes down, and lay across the mouth of its hall and did not move again.

[Your clone has slain Apex Destroyer - Forest Hunter Elder]

[You have gained +24 talent fragments]

[Echo acquired: Apex Destroyer - Forest Hunter Elder]

Northern read that twice.

’Twenty-four. Two hundred years old, and you’re worth twenty-four...’

Then his eyes went back to the last line, to the one word in it that mattered, and he let himself grin.

’Found you.’

The rest took until the sun was low in the west.

He did not enjoy that part as much. With their thread cut, the last three thousand were only animals, big and dangerous animals, and killing animals in a pen was work, not a fight. But none of them could be allowed to reach the villages, and all of them were fragments. And so he went through the valley methodically, from one ice wall to the other, with Lightning Rod humming in his hands, until there was nothing left in it that moved.

When it was done, he climbed back to the top of the heap and sat down.

He let Windless go.

Sound came back into the valley all at once, like a door opening onto a busy street. The creak of the great trees. The drip of melting ice. The wind moving through the roots. Somewhere high above him, a crow that had slept through the whole day woke up in its nest, looked down at the valley, and said something very rude about it.

Northern sat on his mountain with his elbows on his knees and bled quietly and read the total.

[Forest Hunters slain: 11,346]

[Talent fragments gained: +179,460]

[Echoes acquired: 11,346]

He looked at the numbers for a long time.

He had not summoned a single Echo all day. They were all still there, sitting quietly in the Soul Forge, eleven thousand, three hundred and forty-six of them, with one grey giant among them. He could feel them waiting for him to call.

He did not call.

Instead, he looked down at the valley, at the dead lying in heaps between the great roots, at the black spears scattered across the frozen ground, and at the long, pale ice walls glowing orange in the setting sun.

’I’m going to have to explain those walls...’

His whole body hurt. His clone’s essence was very nearly gone. He had holes in him that Infinite Iteration was still, grumpily, closing.

He was grinning anyway, and the grin would not go away.