Free Web NovelChapter 83: Leveling Up
Cruoris first light touched the Cruentus.
The crimson hue of the Black Earth’s morning reached the Heart through the gaps the ancient trunks had grown apart enough to leave — descending in columns onto the red canopy, the bloodglow’s cycling crimson giving way to the different crimson of the first light, the long Umbrath night that had held the whole expedition finally releasing its claim on the forest. The Red Widow’s shriek — the hunting call that had echoed through the Heart and rattled its denizens — had subsided. The forest had gone calm.
Calm the way a thing went calm when the violence in it had simply moved elsewhere.
Kei watched the glade from his fissure.
The Choir-Eater was nearly finished. Seven of the derived apparitions left, no more — the long body working through them one at a time, the interrupted feast resuming toward its end. An hour, he judged. An hour at most before the last of them was gone and the glade held nothing that needed feeding.
" Asp , " he said, low, into the thin seam of trunk between their concealments. " Asp. "
No answer came.
" Asp. "
The answer came, but not from Asp.
" Asp is sleeping. " Tula’s voice, through the wooden veil. " I will take the watch. You can rest now, Kaiser. "
" Ok , " Kei said.
And he closed his eyes, and inside the dark behind them he reached for Epoch.
*Can I level up. Now ?*
*Not the most convenient time , * Epoch answered. *But perhaps the most important one. The terrain ahead of you will not improve. So — yes. You can.* A pause. *Remember the constraint. You cannot jump levels. The process is progressive. One stage at a time, each on its own.*
*Understood. Assign five thrill points for leveling up.*
The VDU fired behind his closed eyes.
*[ FIVE THRILL POINTS ALLOCATED FOR LEVEL UP. CURRENT THRILL POINTS REMAINING : 9. LEVEL-UP INITIATION IN 3 ... 2 ... — ADVISING THE HOST TO BRACE ; THE PROCESS WILL BE PAINFUL — ... 1 ]*
Kei braced.
Nothing happened.
The seconds passed and his body remained his own, whole and unremarkable in the fissure, and the bracing began to feel foolish.
*Epoch. What happened?*
*And zero , * Epoch said. *Start.*
---
At a small distance from the boundary where the Cruentus Mouth gave way to the Heart, a Hollow Stalker was killing something slowly.
It swung its heavy forearms in wide violent arcs, and where they landed they broke what they landed on — and what they landed on was a female rakshasa, bare-bodied, her two arms already broken down into fleshy appendages that hung from her shoulders without function. She fought anyway. She moved into the blows as though something had decided for her that she would keep moving into them, her face blank, no pain registering on it, her eyes hollow and broken with only the faintest tinge of something underneath — a grief, a despair, banked far down beneath whatever had been done to the mind that should have been behind them.
Behind her, at a watching distance, four male rakshasa stood.
Velcrux. Morvane. Tharion. And Azrakar, the two Gravehounds at his flanks — all of them watching the beating with the specific pleasure of those for whom it was entertainment. The female was Pavel’s mother. What had been done to her the evening before, in the reed house, by more than one of them, had taken her mind past the place a mind returned from — and what was left was being spent now as a fighter set against a real Hollow Stalker, to see how much a broken thing could endure before it stopped. It was Azrakar’s idea. The others had not objected.
" Azrakar , let us move. "
Velcrux’s voice, flat with the practicality of a professional whose appetite was satisfied and whose mind had returned to the schedule. " Someone will find the children in the reed house soon enough. They will tell the patrols, and the patrols will come looking. The sooner we retrieve Zevrac’s body, the sooner we return. " He looked at the battered shape being broken in front of them. " We have stocked enough dead for the research. And we have had our fun with her. "
Azrakar smirked.
He looked at the female, and he closed his hands, and he chanted something low.
The broken body surged.
A forced energy poured into it from the place Azrakar’s chant reached, and the female sprinted — toward the Hollow Stalker, fast, faster than the broken legs should have carried her. The Stalker heard the footsteps and swung, and the body dodged the forearm by the breadth of a hair and closed and bit, teeth finding the Stalker’s throat — and finding nothing, the crude hide turning rakshasa teeth aside, the bite achieving the thing a bite achieves against a wall.
It was the last thing she did, and it was an attack.
A cloud of black and violet bloomed around them both, the Stalker and the woman, and before the Stalker could throw her off or strike her down, both bodies came apart inside it — bursting open into pieces of flesh and muscle and grey matter and bone, a thin drizzle of blood through the rest. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
Azrakar laughed. Velcrux laughed with him.
They walked through the scattered pieces toward the Cruentus Heart, Morvane and Tharion behind them, the Gravehounds moving without sound, and the boundary closed behind the last of them.
---
The pain reached Kei all at once.
It came as Epoch had promised it would and worse than Epoch had let him expect — every bone in his body and every strand of muscle beginning to break at once, the ligaments coming apart at the joints, the structure of him being unmade from the inside the way a thing is unmade by a weight that does not stop. Sweat sheeted his body. Blood came from his orifices, from the eyes and the nose and the ears, the internal pressure of the remaking finding the channels available to it.
And then — the cruelty of the process — the pain receded.
It drew back, far enough that for an instant he thought it had finished. And then it returned at its full force all at once, and the returning was worse than the staying would have been, the body told it was over and then told it was not, the pain arriving fresh each time it came back as though it had never been there before.
Tears ran from Kei’s eyes.
He did not shout. He had put a fold of cloth between his teeth before the countdown, and he bit down on it and held the shout behind it, every part of his discipline bent to the single task of making no sound — because the Choir-Eater was forty meters off in the glade with nothing else to distract it and a sound was a thing that traveled, and a man who screamed his way through a transformation in a tree did not survive to use it.
He bit the cloth. He bled. He stayed silent.
And the pain, at its peak, began to turn.
The breaking became mending. The bones that had come apart found each other and merged, the merging carrying its own deep ache but an ache on the far side of the worst of it. The torn ligaments knit. The muscle that had been unmade grew back across the new structure, and a feeling moved through him as it did — not the absence of the pain but something laid over its memory, a soothing, an overwhelming flood of rightness as the body finished becoming what the five points had bought.
In the glade, the Choir-Eater finished the last of the derived apparitions.
It rolled onto its back. The twenty meters of it stretched against the forest floor, the segmented length extending and contracting in the slow indulgent motion of a thing that had eaten everything it had come to eat and was full and satisfied and in no hurry about anything at all.
The hour was over.
The VDU resolved behind Kei’s eyes.
*[ LEVEL UP ACHIEVED. CURRENT LEVEL : 2. ATTRIBUTE RANGES INCREASED. NEW SKILL SET ADDED. SHADOW DOMAIN SUPPRESSION NOW VOLUNTARY. SUPPRESSION REMOVED ON MARTIAL AND THIRD (UNKNOWN) DOMAINS — BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE : THE AFFINITIES ARE PRESENT AND NOT YET LOCATED. ]*
Kei lay in the fissure, spent, the last of the soothing still moving through him, the blood drying at his nose and ears.
He understood the last line for what it was. Not a gift. The locks were off — but the doors were where they had always been, somewhere down in the channels the crimson markings ran through, waiting to be found the way the shadow had waited to be found in the root enclosure at the boundary, in the stillness, beneath the hum. The martial and the third were his to reach now. They were not his to use until he reached them.
That was work for later. There was nearer work first.
" Epoch , " he said, his voice frail, barely carrying past his own teeth. " Show me the full status screen. Attributes and skills. "
