Chapter 509 - 509: Been So long

The last monster hit the ground burning and did not get back up. The clones were all done with destroying every monster as well,

Silva stood in the middle of it, sword in hand, the black flames still running along the blade, and looked at what remained of the hundred that had come at them. The forest around the clearing was doing its own accounting of the fight, trees burning in clusters, the ground scorched in patterns that mapped every exchange.

His ten clones stood at various points around the clearing, some of them trailing smoke, all of them still.

"Done," one of them said.

Silva exhaled.

"Silva."

Zion's voice carried something in it that made Silva look up before the word had finished.

"Look out, seems the awakened monster is not yet done"

The ground moved.

Not from impact. From something beneath it, the scorched earth pulling apart and the burning remains of the hundred beginning to move toward each other, each piece and fragment and half-destroyed body sliding across the ground, the movement slow at first and then faster, the direction of all of it pointing inward toward a single point at the center of the clearing.

They were merging, trying to form back into the full awakened abyss monster once again.

Silva watched the first two sections connect and understood immediately what he was looking at.

He was not going to let it finish.

"All of you," he said. "Now, take it down in chunks until it can not move anymore."

All ten clones moved at the same moment he did.

They spread outward across the clearing and came in from every angle simultaneously, not waiting for the merge to progress but attacking the forming sections as they moved, each one targeting whatever was closest and most consolidated.

Silva took the center.

A torso had half-formed from the merger of four bodies, the dark mass of it still shifting and reshaping, and he drove his sword into it before it could solidify and released the black flames directly into the wound. The flames spread through the interior of the forming mass faster than it could compensate, burning from the inside while the outside tried to continue merging.

He pulled the sword free and moved to the next section.

Beside him a clone caught a forming arm mid-construction, the four-armed configuration trying to take shape from the remnants of three separate bodies, and cut through it twice in rapid succession, the black flames stripping whatever cohesion the merger had built before it could establish itself.

The arm collapsed back into pieces.

The pieces tried to move toward each other again immediately.

The clone burned them separately.

A tendril formation came from the left, a long twisted rope of merged flesh that had found a different shape than the standard body form, and it moved faster than the larger sections, snaking across the ground toward Silva's ankle. He saw it and redirected his wing to blast it with black flames from above, the fire hitting the tendril along its length and breaking the connection that held it together, the pieces falling apart and scattering.

Another tendril formed from a different direction.

A clone took it before it reached full extension, the sword coming down in a clean diagonal that split it and the flames following immediately after.

The central mass was still trying to build itself.

It had gotten further than the peripheral sections, a rough torso and partial head having taken shape from the largest concentration of merged bodies, and it was pulling the remaining pieces toward itself with increasing urgency, understanding at whatever level it was capable of understanding that the parts it was losing were not coming back.

A hand pushed out from the half-formed torso, reaching for the nearest clone.

Two clones converged on it from either side before it could close on anything, both of them hitting the arm simultaneously, and the black flames from both consumed it in seconds, the arm burning back to nothing before the torso could pull more material to replace it.

Silva came in from above.

He came down hard with both feet landing on the top of the forming head, the impact driving it into the ground, and released the flames from both palms into it at contact range, pouring everything into the point of connection.

The head burned.

The torso beneath him thrashed, trying to dislodge him, the remaining loose sections of the merger throwing themselves at him from every direction to help it.

The clones were already there.

They hit the incoming sections before any of them reached Silva, the clearing filling with the sound and light of consecutive impacts, each clone working its own section of the battlefield while he held the center, and the flames built on each other until the entire clearing was burning in the particular black that his fire produced.

The central mass lost cohesion.

It happened in stages, the torso first, the connection between the merged bodies breaking down as the flames worked through it, and then the peripheral sections losing their drive toward each other as whatever had been directing the merge deteriorated.

The pieces burned individually.

They burned completely.

By the time the last of it was gone, there was nothing left that could merge with anything, no pieces large enough to serve as a starting point, no mass remaining that the awakened abyss monster could use to rebuild itself from.

Silva stood in the center of it and waited.

Nothing moved.

The burning forest crackled around him. The clones stood at their positions, flame-lit, watching the same ground he was watching.

Still nothing.

He let another ten seconds pass.

"It's done," Zion said from somewhere above him.

Silva looked at the ground one more time.

Then he let the flames on his sword go out.

"Yeah," he said. "It's done."

[you haved gained 100 EXP] X10

Silva could not help but smile when he saw that message, it hsd been so long.