Chapter 568: Challenger IV
Chapter 568: Challenger IV
The first base looked different now.
Not unrecognizable... No, he had been here recently enough that the bones of the place were familiar, the shape of the clearing, the particular way the treeline formed around it, the scarred ground where the engagement had carved itself into the terrain. He knew this place.
But it had been repopulated.
Not by demons. By the forest’s other residents. The ones that had been displaced or driven to the edges during the period of heavy demonic occupation, the ones that had stayed away from this section of the forest while the demons maintained their presence here and were now returning to find that the presence was gone.
Finding, also, that what the demons had left behind was useful.
Mana beasts.
A dozen of them, and maybe more as he counted from above as Skylar descended through the canopy, the shapes below moving through the ruins of the first base with the unhurried confidence of creatures that had assessed the space and determined they were currently at the top of whatever hierarchy it contained.
Some of them were still moving.
Others weren’t.
The ones that weren’t were occupied with the ones they had already stopped.
The battle that had taken place here, his battle, which was the first demon engagement of his time in the forest this time, had left casualties that extended beyond the demons themselves.
Mana beasts caught in the radius of the fight, things that had been unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when destruction had been less controlled and Damien had been less careful about what fell in front of him. The forest had not wasted them.
Nothing in a forest like this ever went to waste for long.
The beasts that had come back were having a feast.
Damien landed Skylar at the edge of the clearing and dismounted without disturbing the scene ahead of him. The beasts closest to his landing point raised their heads, registered the new presence, assessed it, decided it was either ignorable or a problem for later, and returned to what they were doing.
He walked past them.
The altar was nearby as he had the record’s directional reference in his memory and the residual awareness of the other two activations giving him a baseline sense for what the third one would feel like when he was close to it.
He moved through the clearing without engaging anything, stepping around the larger beasts without making it either a confrontation or an accommodation.
He was not here for them... yet.
The altar was in the ruins of the first base’s structure—not deep inside, not buried the way the third stronghold’s had been. This one was at ground level, incorporated into the outer wall of what had been the base’s edge. A section of the wall had partially collapsed in the fight, exposing the material beneath, and the altar was set into that material—the carved surface now visible in a way it probably hadn’t been when the wall was intact.
He had found it in three minutes so he crouched.
Damien looked at the surface which was smaller than the others, oriented vertically rather than horizontal or angled. The script was the same family but the arrangement was different again, the way different hands writing the same language produced the same words in different shapes.
He drew the blade.
His palm was healing. The cut from the third stronghold’s altar had sealed properly now, and the one he had reopened at the second base was close behind it. And so, he made a new cut. Clean. Across the same line.
Pressed his palm to the altar.
The blood spread.
He waited.
The glow did not come.
He held his hand there for ten seconds. Twenty. The altar’s surface remained dark—absorbing his blood, the script taking it in the way the others had, but producing none of the immediate light he had now come to expect.
He pulled his hand back.
Looked at the altar.
Looked around the clearing.
The mana beasts were still going about their business—eating, moving, the low sounds of creatures occupying a space they had decided was theirs. The ambient essence in the area was present but thin. The demon blood from the original fight had soaked into the ground here, yes—but this clearing had been the outermost base, the one furthest from the center of Damien’s most concentrated fighting. The engagement here had been real but shorter than the others. Less total.
’Not enough.’ He straightened and looked at the mana beasts in the clearing.
Then at the altar.
Then at the mana beasts again.
A slow smirk formed.
They had better timing than they knew.
He rolled his neck once. Then his shoulders. The motion of someone setting something aside and arriving at something else. Not reluctantly, not with the weight of a task being added to an already full list.
With interest.
He had been fighting with summons since he entered this forest. Every major engagement had been built around deploying them, directing them, using the specific qualities of each one at the right moment.
That was good strategy. That was correct. His summons were extensions of his capability and refusing to use them would have been waste of the worst kind.
But there was something else, separate from strategy.
Something he had been maintaining quietly underneath all the summon-dependent fights—his own body, his own essence output, his own capacity for combat that existed independently of what he could call through a portal. He had used it against the captains. Had kept it sharp through every exchange.
He wanted it sharp now.
No Fenrir to intercept. No Cerbe to create chaos. No Luton to absorb the things that got through.
Just him.
And however many mana beasts were in this clearing.
He looked at the nearest one.
Grade Four, by the density of its core—a wide, low creature with a heavily armored back, four powerful legs that kept its body close to the ground, a head that was mostly jaw. It had been eating and had not yet decided that the human standing twenty meters away was more interesting than what was in front of it.
He covered the twenty meters.
The beast’s head came up fast—faster than its build suggested it should be able to move, the jaw opening into something that showed exactly how it had been dealing with the armored hides of the things it was currently eating.
Damien’s hand drove into its side before the jaw reached him.
Not a strike. Not a punch in the way he had been punching demon captains. His fingers were together, palm flat, the hand rigid—the shape of something meant to enter rather than impact.
His essence pushed through it.
The armored back was hard. The sides were less so—built for power and forward movement, not lateral defense. His palm found the gap between two of the lower armor plates and the essence behind it did the rest, cutting through the hide beneath with the kind of focused pressure that required less brute force than it did precision.
His fingers found the core.
It was deep—further in than he had estimated, the beast’s body larger than it appeared from the outside. But his fingers found it anyway, the particular dense warmth of a mana core unmistakable once you were close enough to feel it.
He closed his hand around it.
Pulled.
The beast made one sound which was neither a roar nor the drawn-out cry of something dying in a fight. It was a rather short, final thing.
Thud!
Then it dropped.
Damien straightened.
His arm was bloody to the elbow.
He looked at it briefly.
Then at the clearing.
The other beasts had registered what just happened—some of them turning, some of them already moving in his direction, the particular dynamic of a group of predators recalibrating when one of their number went down without a conventional fight.
He moved toward the nearest one.
Grade Four again—different type, longer and lower, with a mane of hardened quills along its spine that it had raised when he came within fifteen meters. The quills were the defense mechanism. The quills were also telling him exactly where the core was not.
He went left and the beast tracked him as he feinted right.
The beast committed to the feint—its body turning to match his apparent direction—and he reversed, driving past its flank before it could correct. His palm drove into the exposed side below the quill line.
Same motion. Same entry. Same push of essence through the gap in the hide.
The core was shallower in this one.
He had it in two seconds.
The beast dropped.
He turned.
Three had grouped together—not a coordinated formation, just proximity, the instinctive clustering of things that had identified a threat and were generating collective presence as a response. Grade Four, all three, the largest of them carrying a build that put it at the high end of the grade.
The high-end one came first.
It was faster than the previous two and more direct—no hesitation in the approach, the kind of speed that had probably always been enough against whatever it hunted in this forest.