Chapter 513: Forces Of The Fog [I]
Back at Blessed Land, his days were consumed by work.
It was necessary work, the foundational labor of building an empire, but it rarely gave him an excuse to simply unleash his core.
He hadn’t stood on an open field with a bare blade and nothing to manage but the trajectory of incoming steel in a while but out here, deep beneath the basin’s crust, there really was nothing to balance.
There was only distance, momentum, and things that needed to be cut down.
"SQUAWWWWWWWK!"
The ear-splitting screech rattled against Silas’s eardrum from barely three inches away.
The obsidian bird, still clamped to his left leather vambrace with a white-knuckled bone-deep grip, flapped its crystalline wings erratically, snapping its scythe-curved beak toward the ceiling.
From the high shadows of an overhanging basalt arch, a second leech... twice the length of the first, its pale rubbery hide covered in weeping bioluminescent yellow boils lunged silently through the air like an uncoiling spring with its maw wide as it was aiming straight for the back of Silas’s neck!
Silas didn’t even turn his head.
His reaction was pure reflex as he stepped half a pace to the left, pivoting on his heel with efficiency.
The lunging monster missed his shoulder by less than two inches with the cold rush of its displacement whipping the fur trim of his coat.
As the beast sailed past, Silas raised his empty left hand, pointing his index and middle fingers directly at its bloated underbelly.
"Currents of the deep, compress and divide," Silas murmured. "Water that shears the stone, form the edge... Abyssal Sever."
There really were times when one wanted to say the chant and right now was a very good example.
SHING!
A five-foot crescent of compressed aqua mana detonated from his fingertips at point-blank range.
SQUELCH-BOOM!
The pressurized water blade didn’t just slice the worm as the hydraulic shock wave expanded inside its rubbery cavity, blowing the entire twelve-foot creature into thousands of tiny shredded chunks of gray meat that rained harmlessly across the stone floor.
"What a weird place..." Silas muttered, lowering his hand and shaking his head.
He looked around, taking in the suffocating scale of the subterranean expanse.
The cavern was colossal... so vast that the jagged tooth-like stalactites hanging from the ceiling were lost in pitch-black shadow hundreds of feet above.
The ground was an uneven wasteland of petrified black shale, broken granite pillars, and fossilized ribcages that curved out of the permafrost like the frames of sunken galleons.
And drifting through it all, thick as curdled milk, was that relentless, unnatural white fog.
It wasn’t rising from the floor like normal swamp vapor... It pulsed instead.
’Eerie shit.’
Every few seconds, a low-frequency atmospheric wave would ripple through the cavern, causing the mist to swirl and thicken, rolling across the stone in lazy tides that reduced visibility to less than twenty paces.
’From what I can gather,’ Silas analyzed, his mind cataloging the environmental anomalies, ’This isn’t just an abandoned cave system... This is an active nesting ground. The domain of that Tier 5 monster that anchors the fog cycle and we’re walking straight down its throat.’
He glanced down at his boots as the mist had risen to his shins, clinging to his trousers like freezing greasy cobwebs.
’The density is increasing the further we march inward which means the core entity is sitting right in the center of this web.’
He let out an exasperated breathy sigh with his brow furrowing as he looked down at his left wrist.
The obsidian bird was trembling violently.
Its beady crystalline eyes were darting from shadow to shadow, its head twitching in rapid paranoid ticks, its claws digging so hard into his reinforced vambrace that the leather was beginning to groove.
"Why the hell am I down here alone with this useless feathered ornament...?" Silas grumbled aloud, his tone sounding thoroughly unimpressed.
He gave his arm a firm annoyed shake, but the bird only squawked in terror and clamped its talons down even harder.
"Seriously," Silas muttered, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "If the spatial trap had to grab someone, why couldn’t it take Valkyrie? At least she has teeth... She has four legs, she doesn’t screech in my ear every time a worm drops from the ceiling, and she’s infinitely more useful in a scrap than a paranoid crow."
The bird looked up at him, its crested head tilting as if it understood every single insult, letting out an offended sound.
"Krrr-clack!"
"Don’t give me that look," Silas scoffed, stepping over a shattered rib bone. "You’re supposed to be a divine guide... So far, all you’ve done is use my shoulder as a perch and scream at shadows."
He paused, looking back over his shoulder toward the empty mist behind him.
The immediate silence of the deep cavern made him pause. For a brief second, his thoughts drifted back to the frozen ridge above.
’Did Eluned follow standing orders?’ he wondered, an amused smirk touching his lips. ’Section Four which said immediate retreat to the perimeter and regroup with Brida.’
He gave a soft dry chuckle, shaking his head.
’Not a chance in hell.’
He knew his women far too well.
The Princess would have panicked naturally, but Eluned’s divine arrogance would never allow her to turn her back on the basin, especially with the Beast Goddess’s signature calling to her.
’I’m sure she can sense her about now...’
Morwenna would rather drown in shale than run from a fight, and Tasmin’s loyalty lay with him, not the manual.
They were marching north and he was certain of it.
"We have to reach the center before they do," Silas said, turning his gaze back into the fog and picking up his pace. "If Eluned and Morwenna find that goddess without me, they’ll spend three weeks arguing over who gets the credit for breaking the seal, and Brida will use my absence as an excuse to turn the keep’s courtyard into an open-air wrestling pit..."
On his arm, the obsidian bird blinked its dark eyes.
It looked at the man’s broad unbothered shoulders, the relaxed rhythmic swing of his longsword, and the casual absence of fear in his posture.
The bird let out a bewildered questioning click.
"Caw...?"
To the avian familiar, this place was a waking nightmare.
It had flown these corridors for a long time, watching great beasts and ancient heroes enter the whiteout only to be hollowed out into bleached bone.
The entity that ruled this deep pit was a terror of the northern fault lines... a nightmare of necrotic hunger and dampness that had choked entire armies in the old wars against monsters.
Yet this mortal man was walking through the slaughterhouse as if he were taking an afternoon stroll through an orchard, complaining about his schedule and mocking the local fauna.
’Why is he so confident?’ the bird wondered, its small chest heaving with nervous clicks. ’Is there some unfathomable power slumbering within his blood? Or is he simply too ignorant to comprehend the horrors waiting in the dark?’
Silas didn’t bother to explain.
He simply walked.
As they pressed deeper into the cavern, the landscape deteriorated into petrified ruin.
The ground sloped steadily downward, descending into a massive sunken amphitheater of jagged stone.
The air grew increasingly thick, so humid and cold that tiny crystals of greasy rime began forming along the edges of Silas’s cloak.
The milky-white fog rose to his waist, swirling in sluggish eddies with every step he took.
Suddenly, Silas halted.
𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂
His boots stopped on the edge of a wide circular clearing flanked by six broken granite monoliths.
Within his chest, the Mythic Gold Core gave a gentle pulse, circulating a warm current of golden mana through his ocular nerves.
’Haah... Good...’
He didn’t just use normal vision either, Silas lightly adjusted the moisture balance within his own eyeballs, tapping into his personal adaptation of Morwenna’s Rip-Current Perception.
The world shifted into high-contrast shades of deep navy and luminous aqua.
Through the dense opaque wall of mist, Silas could finally sense distinct mana signatures.
’Seven... eight... nine,’ Silas counted mentally, his hand tightening around the golden hilt. ’Low-tier monsters, but their cores are strange.’
SH-SH-SH-CLICK!
From the top of the broken monoliths twenty paces ahead, several silhouettes shifted in the gloom.
They were Mist-Spitters... grotesque four-legged aberrations that looked like a repulsive fusion between an armored toad and a bloated tick.
Their slate-gray carapaces were covered in weeping, pressurized vents, and their elongated throats were swelling with sickening bubbling sounds.
PHT-PHT-PHT-PHT!
Without a fraction of warning, four of the beasts fired simultaneously.
From their maws erupted a volley of high-velocity crystallized projectiles...
They weren’t acid like Silas expected.
WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!
They were jagged four-inch spikes of petrified bone-ice, launched with the concussive force of crossbows, whistling through the fog straight toward Silas’s chest and throat.
"SKREEEEE!" The bird shrieked, ducking its head beneath Silas’s wrist but Silas didn’t even blink.
He simply shifted his weight onto his back heel, rotating his shoulders by a fraction of an inch.
TICK-TICK-SHING!
Two of the bone-spikes whistled past his ear, severing a single hair from his temple, while the third struck the flat of his golden longsword with a crisp harmless clang, deflecting harmlessly into the ceiling.
Silas raised his left hand, his palm flat against the incoming fourth spike—
FWOOM!
A tiny razor-sharp vortex of compressed wind erupted from his palm... a small pulse of [Hurricane Repulsion].
The miniature atmospheric barrier caught the bone-spike in mid-air, reversing its target in seconds.
THWACK!
The reflected spike shot backward through the mist, driving clean through the eye of the lead spitter.
The beast let out a muffled wet gurgle, toppling backward off the monolith to crash into the shale with a dull thud.
"Annoying little pests," Silas muttered.
BOOM!
He detonated into motion as his boots shattered the permafrost, launching him across the twenty paces in the space between two heartbeats.
The golden longsword blurred into a radiant arc of sun-bright steel.
SLASH-CRUNCH-SPLAT!
In three clean and terrifyingly efficient strokes, Silas cleaved the remaining three spitters from their perches.
The radiant heat-laced Gold Core mana cauterized the wounds instantly, leaving behind neat smoldering cross-sections of monster flesh that collapsed into the fog without a sound.
He landed lightly on the stone with his breath steady and his sword held low.
"Is that all this fog has to offer?" Silas murmured, stepping over a severed leg. "Just an endless conveyor belt of target practice?"
RUMBLE...
As if the cavern itself had heard his insolent challenge, the ground beneath his boots violently shuddered.
The white fog churned into a violent maelstrom as from the dark fissures lining the amphitheater walls, dozens of glowing red and sickly yellow eyes ignited in the mist!
A high-pitched, wet chittering sound echoed off the basalt ceiling, multiplying until it sounded like a roaring river of scuttling limbs.
"HAUUUUUUHAUHAUUUU!"
A horde of at least forty monsters surged out of the shadows.
There were dozens of the segmented Corpse-Leeches writhing through the air, packs of six-legged Bone-Scuttlers tearing across the stone with diamond-hard claws, and heavy acid-bloated spitters ringing the high ledges!
"SQUAWWWWWWWK!"
The obsidian bird lost its mind completely.
It abandoned Silas’s arm, fluttering frantically into the air with its wings beating a desperate retreat toward the highest farthest ceiling stalactite it could reach, perching on a narrow stone spur and trembling so hard its feathers rattled!
Silas looked up at the fleeing bird, letting out an amused mocking snort.
"Coward," Silas muttered.
He turned back toward the incoming tide of monsters, rolling his shoulders with relaxed fluid grace.
’Forty-odd low tiers... and one large presence hiding in the back.’
His [Rip-Current Perception] caught a heavy mana signature lingering just beyond the edge of the horde... a massive silent silhouette moving through the thickest bank of mist with chilling patience.
’A Tier 4 at least... Let’s see what kind of toys this nest breeds.’
"RAHHHHH!"
The front line of twelve Bone-Scuttlers lunged simultaneously, their jagged claws extended to shred him into kindling.
BOOM!
Silas met them head-on as he didn’t retreat an inch and his golden longsword became a spinning wheel of golden light.
CLANG-SHING-CHOP!
The first scuttler was bisected from snout to tail.
Silas spun on his heel, using the rotational torque to drive the flat of his blade into the second beast’s skull, shattering the bone into powder with pure unassisted physical strength.
He vaulted over the falling corpse with his left hand snapping forward—
"[Incineration Ray]!"
ZAP-BOOOOOOM!
A concentrated pencil-thin beam of pure solar fire erupted from his index finger!
The beam punched clean through the chests of four charging beasts in a straight line, superheating their internal fluids until their carapaces exploded from the inside out in violent, concussive pops of smoldering ash!
SHSHSHK!
Silas ducked low, feeling the wind of three jumping leeches whistle over his head!
Without looking, he thrust his blade straight upward into the belly of the first, channeled a burst of heavy-water mana along the spine, and swept the blade horizontally in a wide arc.
"Tidal-Blade Arts: First Style... Severing Horizon!"
KRA-BOOOOOOM!
A thirty-foot crescent wave of phantom heavy-water exploded outward from his stance.
The hydraulic mass hit the swarm like an avalanche, crushing fifteen monsters against the basalt walls in a single earth-shaking impact.
Shattered carapaces and pulverized bone rained down into the rising mist like hail yet, right in the middle of Silas’s follow-through—
SNAP.
The space directly behind Silas’s right blind spot folded and from the dense whiteout, a massive, terrifying shape materialized out of nothingness.