Chapter 569: Challenger V
Chapter 569: Challenger V
It hit him before he had fully read the approach, its shoulder catching his with enough force to rotate him sideways.
He went with it.
Planted.
Reversed the rotation and used the momentum to carry his palm around in an arc that put it against the beast’s neck rather than its side. Different angle. The core in this build was higher—he could feel the density of it through the hide even before his hand entered.
He pressed.
The essence cut.
His fingers found it from an angle that was less clean than the previous two—he had to work for it, the beast still moving, still trying to shake him, its body generating the particular frenzy of something that had registered intrusion and was responding with everything it had.
He held on.
Found the core.
Pulled it free.
The beast folded immediately, the specific, total cessation that came when the core left the body—not the gradual dying of something that had been injured, but the instantaneous collapse of something whose central mechanism had been removed.
The other two were already on him.
He took them in sequence—not perfectly, not without cost. The first one’s claws found his shoulder before he could get his arm inside its guard, tearing through fabric and leaving three lines across his skin that registered as sharp and immediate and not deep enough to matter. He repaid it immediately, driving into its side with the practiced entry that was already becoming familiar, extracting the core before the second beast could close.
The second beast hit him full force.
He absorbed it—no Luton, no reinforced guard, just his body taking the impact and his legs finding the ground beneath him before he lost it—and retaliated before he had fully finished recovering. Inward, under the beast’s chest, where the anatomy of this type put the core high and central.
His palm drove in.
His fingers found it.
He pulled.
The clearing was quieter now.
He straightened.
Looked at his arms—both of them coated to the forearm or beyond with the particular evidence of what he had been doing. The ground around him carried the same evidence, spread across the soil in the way that a quantity of violent, rapid work produced.
He looked at the altar.
Then at the clearing.
There were still beasts alive—the ones that had
been furthest from the engagement, the ones that had retreated to the treeline when the first death happened, the ones now watching him from a distance with the particular stillness of creatures reassessing whether this space was as attractive as it had been twenty minutes ago.
He moved toward the treeline.
Not chasing. Moving. Closing the distance steadily, making the decision for them that the distance they had put between themselves and him was not sufficient.
They ran.
Or tried to.
Three of them he caught before they reached the edge of the clearing—the same entries, the same extractions, quick and direct. The fourth made the tree line and vanished into the forest, the sound of it crashing through the undergrowth fading quickly.
One survivor.
He let it go.
He turned back toward the altar.
The clearing was still now. Properly still—the kind of quiet that came after all the living things in a space had either left it or stopped being living. His footprints back to the altar were the only movement.
He crouched beside it.
Pressed his palm—the same cut, still producing what was needed—flat against the surface.
The blood spread.
This time, the glow came before his hand had fully settled.
Rising from the script, warm and immediate, spreading outward from the contact point with the same quality the others had carried—patient, steady, indifferent to everything that had just happened in its vicinity to earn it.
Damien watched it reach full brightness.
Three altars.
Three down.
He looked at his hands.
Then at the clearing—the mana beasts that had found the remains of his first battle here and decided this was a good place to eat, now themselves contributing to the conditions of something they had never known existed.
The altar glowed at his back.
He stood.
Cleaned his hands against the least damaged section of his clothing, which was not saying much.
Luton dropped from his head, landed beside him, pulsed once, and began moving through the clearing with the quiet efficiency of something that had watched the last twenty minutes and understood that there was cleanup to do.
Damien watched it for a moment.
Then looked at the forest ahead of him.
Four altars remaining.
Four locations.
He did not know yet how many of them he had already been to.
He pulled out the record fragment and checked the remaining positions against his internal map of where he had moved through the forest.
Read the result.
Then stood still for a moment with the kind of stillness that came from receiving information that changed the scope of what you were looking at.
Interesting.
~~~~~
The fourth altar was not somewhere he had been.
He knew that the moment he cross-referenced the remaining locations against his internal map of the forest. The first three had been gifts—places he had already saturated with blood and death without knowing what he was doing for. The fourth was different. A fresh coordinate. A part of the Forest of Twin Disasters he had not yet moved through, sitting in a section of the forest that the demons had apparently not occupied and that his own path had not crossed.
He was going to have to earn this one from the beginning.
He told Skylar the heading and they flew.
The forest below changed character as they moved—not dramatically, not with the kind of obvious shift that announced itself. But gradually. The canopy thickened in places it had been thinner. The terrain below became more irregular, the ground rising and falling in patterns that suggested older geology beneath the soil, formations that predated the forest itself.
Dense.
Old.
The ambient essence in this section was different from what he had become accustomed to in the stronghold regions—less corrupted, the demonic taint that had been woven into the forest’s air near the bases giving way to something rawer. More fundamental. The forest’s own essence, undisturbed.
Which meant the mana beasts here would be different too.
Wilder. Less influenced by the demonic presence that had been reshaping behavior in the regions he had already worked through. Closer to whatever they were before the demons arrived.
He landed Skylar at the edge of a section where the canopy broke enough to provide a viable descent and dismounted in the particular quiet of a part of the forest that had not yet been introduced to him.
He found the altar in two hours.
Not because it was easy to find—it wasn’t. The fourth altar was the most concealed of the three he had located so far, set into the base of a massive root formation that was indistinguishable from the dozens of similar formations in this section of the forest unless you were specifically reading the faint resonance of demonic construction beneath the natural growth that had partially absorbed it over time.
He read it.
Found it.
Crouched.
Pressed his palm to the surface and let his blood do the registration.
Then sat back on his heels and looked at the clearing around the altar.
Quiet.
Empty.
No residual demon blood. No mana beast casualties from a battle that had passed through. No convenient saturation of the surrounding soil with the proof the altar required.
He was going to have to bring his own.
He stood and looked at the forest.
Luton dropped from his head and landed beside him, pulsing once in the way it did when it was oriented toward the same direction he was and ready for whatever came next.
"Not yet," he said.
He needed to rest first.
The last several hours—the third stronghold, the altars, the flight, the mana beast clearing at the first base—had accumulated into something that his body was beginning to present an invoice for. Not collapse-level exhaustion. But the kind of deep tiredness that sat beneath the surface and would compound itself into something worse if he kept ignoring it.
He found a section of raised ground between two massive root formations where the natural architecture of the forest created something close to shelter—the roots forming walls on two sides, the canopy thick enough above to block most of what the sky might send down. Not comfortable. Comfortable wasn’t available.
Better than the open ground. That was enough.
He sat.
Then lay back.
Luton settled beside him—not on him, for once. Just nearby, its surface dimmed to the low luminescence it produced at rest, a faint ambient light that was more presence than illumination.
Damien looked at the canopy above.
Let the conversion run.
Let the tiredness acknowledge itself without fighting it.
He thought briefly about the sum of what had happened in the Forest of Twin Disasters—the three strongholds, the captains, the discoveries in the records, the altars. The scale of it assembled itself in his mind not as a list of achievements but as a map of distance traveled. How far from the edge of the forest this point was. How far from where he had entered.
How far from what was sealed at the center.
Three altars glowing.
Four remaining.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep came faster than he expected.