Chapter 489 - 489: Stronger ones
The first abyss monster came in fast and low, skimming the ground with its hunched body, tail whipping behind it, jaws already open.
Aris raised one hand and let chaos energy bloom from her palm in a tight concentrated burst. It hit the monster dead center and didn't just stop it, it unmade it, body splitting apart in every direction at once, chunks of dark flesh and black blood painting the trees on either side of the clearing in a wide scattered arc.
She wiped a small speck of it from her cheek with the back of her hand and sighed contentedly.
"Better," she said.
The second came at her from the flank, faster than the first, launching itself at full extension with claws spread wide. She sidestepped it completely, letting it pass through the space she'd occupied a half second ago, and before it touched the ground she was already beneath it, hand pointed upward, chaos energy firing in a single tight column.
It punched through the monster's underside and came out the other end in a clean hole the size of a fist, the creature dropping to the ground in two pieces that twitched once and went still.
She straightened, rolled her shoulders, and looked at what was coming next.
Several of them. A dozen at least, converging from multiple angles at the same time, the kind of coordinated mass rush that worked very well against most targets.
Aris was not most targets.
She moved through them like weather, chaos energy firing in short sharp bursts from both hands, each one finding a different monster at a different angle, not wasteful, not excessive, just enough force applied to exactly the right place. One detonated in mid-leap and rained down across the clearing in pieces. A second took a direct hit to the skull and its head simply stopped existing. A third she caught with a sweeping arc of chaos that lifted it off the ground, spun it in the air, and deposited it into the treeline at significant velocity.
The smile on her face hadn't changed since the first one.
If anything it had gotten wider.
She turned, fired without looking at something that had been creeping up behind her, heard the wet impact, and turned back to the main group without breaking stride.
"Gallan," she muttered to herself, stepping over a body, "please for the love of everything tell me you have found Fang by now."
She pictured him wandering through the forest at his usual unhurried pace, stopping to observe something interesting, getting distracted, being generally Gallan about the whole urgent situation.
"Lazy," she said, and blasted another one apart.
She caught three more in rapid succession, barely slowing between each one, hands moving with a practiced economy that made it look effortless, which it largely was. She hopped backward onto her rock in a single fluid motion, gaining height, gaining perspective, putting a clean twenty meters between herself and the next wave that was gathering at the clearing's edge.
From up here she could see further. She took a breath and looked up at the rift properly for the first time since the fight had started, the tear in the sky hanging there like a wound that refused to close, its edges dark and pulsing. She had seen rifts before, smaller ones, accidental ones, the kind that opened and closed in hours.
This one was different. It had intention behind it. Something had opened this, deliberately and wide, and whatever was on the other side had decided now was the time to send everything through.
Her eyes narrowed.
And then she saw them. Behind the current wave of smaller creatures, still descending through the tear, larger shapes were falling. Much larger. The silhouettes of them were different from the hunched dragonoid things she'd been dismantling, broader and longer-limbed, and even from this distance she could tell the way they fell was different too, not tumbling or crashing, but controlled, intentional, like they were choosing where they landed.
Stronger ones.
She exhaled slowly.
"Well," she said. "Now we're getting somewhere."
The current wave reached the rock and she was already moving again, dropping off the far side and hitting the ground running, chaos energy crackling along both arms as she tore through the cluster before they could properly converge. She moved faster now, more decisive, pulling the shots tighter, not because she was concerned but because the stronger ones were coming and she wanted the field clear before they arrived.
Four more down. Then two more. Then three in a single sweeping burst that sent black blood arcing through the shafts of sunlight coming through the broken treeline.
She stopped.
The clearing had gone briefly quiet.
And then the larger one landed.
It hit the ground with enough force to crack the earth around its feet, and when it straightened to its full height, she understood why. Four arms, the upper two longer than the lower, each ending in hands with fingers that split into narrow razor points rather than proper claws. Its jaw was too wide for its face, filled with teeth that overlapped when its mouth was closed, which it currently was not. Its skin had the same lightless black of the others but thicker, with a faint texture to it like overlapping plate, and when it turned its too-many-teeth gaze on her, it didn't rush.
It assessed.
She smiled.
"Oh good," she said. "An actual fight."
It lunged.
The speed of it was genuinely impressive, all four arms working in combination, the upper two reaching wide to cut off her angles while the lower two drove forward in straight attacking lines, the whole thing designed to make clean avoidance geometrically difficult.
Aris went sideways, under the right upper arm, inside the reach of the lower right before it could adjust, and drove a chaos burst point-blank into its ribs from six inches away.
The impact sent it sideways rather than back, those four arms catching the ground and redistributing the force across its whole body, and it came back at her before she'd fully reset, faster than it should have been after eating that hit, the wide jaw snapping at the space in front of her face.
She ducked under it, stepped back, let it overextend, and hit it with a full-force chaos blast from both hands simultaneously.
The force picked it up completely, all four arms scrabbling at nothing, and hurled it across the clearing into the treeline at the far end, trees snapping and bending as it carved a path through them before coming to a stop somewhere in the dark beyond.
She could hear it moving out there. Getting up.
Not dead. Just moved.
She rolled her neck and waited.
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Fang hit the throne room at full speed, lightning trailing off his fur in crackling threads that grounded themselves against the stone floor with each stride, the smell of ozone preceding him through the doors.
Elena was on the throne with her legs thrown up over one armrest, one hand dangling, humming something quietly to herself, the picture of someone with nowhere pressing to be.
She felt him before she heard him, her eyes opening, and by the time Fang skidded to a stop at the base of the throne steps, her legs were already down and her posture had changed entirely.
She looked at him.
At the urgency in every line of his body, the way his tail moved, the way his eyes hadn't settled since he entered the room.
Her expression shifted.
"What happened," she asked.