Chapter 570: The Fourth Altar
Chapter 570: The Fourth Altar
The first day at the fourth altar’s location was work.
He rose with the forest, not at any particular hour, just when the quality of the darkness above the canopy shifted from the static dark of deep night to the moving dark of pre-dawn, the kind of change that registered even through closed eyes.
He ate what he had and drank from a stream the root formations were channeling.
Then he summoned Fenrir.
Not for combat—or rather, not only for combat. For tracking. The fourth altar’s section of forest was unknown to him, and unknown terrain had unknown residents, and the fastest way to find the residents of unknown terrain was to move through it with a creature whose nose had never failed to locate what it was looking for.
Fenrir found the first group within twenty minutes.
A cluster of Grade Four mana beasts moving through the lower terrain—four of them, traveling together in the loose association of things that had discovered safety in proximity without committing to any actual cooperative behavior. Fenrir tracked them from upwind while Damien read their positions, and when the distance was right he moved.
He kept using his hands.
It had started as a practical decision at the third altar—the mana beasts there had needed to die fast and he had chosen the most direct method available. But something about the directness of it had stayed with him, had felt worth continuing.
The specific intimacy of reaching into a creature and taking the thing that made it run—not violent in the theatrical sense, just final, immediate, honest about what it was.
He worked through the group of four in under ten minutes.
The cores he extracted he stored. Luton collected the rest.
He found more.
This section of forest was populated in ways the demon-occupied zones hadn’t been. The absence of sustained demonic pressure meant the natural balance had held here, which meant the mana beast density was higher than anywhere else he had moved through. More of them. More variety.
The Grade Four to Five range that the first base’s location had shown him was consistent here, with occasional Grade Threes appearing in the areas where the terrain features were most significant, the elevated formations, the denser root networks, the places where the forest’s own essence was richest.
He killed consistently.
Not frantically. Not with the sustained output of a full combat operation. Methodically, moving through the terrain, reading what was there, approaching it, extracting the core, moving on. The pace was sustainable. Something he could maintain across a full day without reaching the kind of exhaustion he had been running from the night before.
He checked the altar at midday.
Nothing yet.
He kept going.
By late afternoon the soil around the altar’s root formation was beginning to carry a different quality, the accumulated blood of what he had been killing throughout the day soaking into the ground, spreading through the root systems the way water spread, reaching toward the altar’s radius through paths he couldn’t see but that the altar could apparently feel.
He checked it again at dusk.
The faintest shimmer.
Not the full glow—not activation—just the first sign that the altar was registering what was happening in its vicinity and finding it relevant.
He took that as sufficient reason to stop for the day.
Found shelter again in the root formations.
He then summoned Cerbe briefly, just for warmth. The hellhound’s body heat in the dark of the forest was significant, and the night in this section of the Forest of Twin Disasters had a colder quality than the regions closer to the strongholds had.
Cerbe settled beside him with the contained, dimmed flame of a creature at rest, all three heads resting on the ground with the communal quality of something that had one body and had long since made peace with the logistics of that.
Damien rested his back against the nearest root.
Checked his reserves.
High. The day’s combat had drawn some, but the conversion process had been running throughout and the pace he’d maintained hadn’t demanded the kind of output that the captain fights had required. He was in good shape.
He slept with Cerbe’s warmth at his side and Luton somewhere nearby doing whatever Luton did at night.
~~~~~
The second day followed the shape of the first.
More hunting. More extractions. The work had found its rhythm—the kind of pace that stopped requiring conscious management and became instead simply what the hours were filled with. He had stopped noting individual kills and was tracking the cumulative effect instead, the slow saturation of the altar’s surrounding terrain, the way the shimmer he had seen at dusk on day one grew incrementally brighter through day two.
The forest provided.
He found a Grade Three mid-morning which was the largest thing he had encountered in this section, an enormous creature with a body built like compressed stone and eyes that registered him with the flat, assessing intelligence of something that had survived long enough to have a developed opinion about threats.
It decided he was one.
The fight was the most demanding thing he had done since the stronghold. The Grade Three’s hide was harder than anything his palm entry technique had worked through yet, the core deeper and better protected by the musculature surrounding it. He had to go in twice—the first entry disrupted, the beast twisting in a way that forced him out before his fingers reached the core—and take a strike to the ribs in the process that he felt in every subsequent breath for the rest of the day.
The second entry found it.
He stood over the Grade Three for a moment afterward, breathing deliberately.
Then filed the rib soreness under things to manage and moved on.
By late afternoon the altar was glowing. Not at full brightness—not the immediate, complete activation of the first three—but growing. The saturation of the surrounding ground was approaching whatever threshold the altar’s conditions required, the blood of the day’s work spreading through the root system and reaching the carved script in accumulating increments.
He sat near it at dusk and watched it brighten.
It was nearly there.