Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty – 220Bastion of Will!
Sovereign of Flesh!
Felix was thrown hard against the burning surface of the Scale, though the sensation soon paled before the onrushing violet light. It seared against his exposed limbs, just as terribly as the rush of corrosive Essence stripped his already weeping channels. Something else rioted within the light, a piece of the Archon fused with the explosion; one last wave of that damn array to finish them all off, maybe. Felix tried reinforcing his Mind and Body against it, but he could feelif not seethe light breaking them down faster than he could regenerate. He could barely think. It wasHe
Ravenous Tithe!
This time, he widened his scope. The Scale, the ambient Essence miasma, the flash of power, opening his mouth wide and letting all of it pour into him. He'd experienced trying to breath in a hurricane, the impossible misery of it, and eating the Maw from the Ravager King had felt like wrestling a firestorm.
This was like taking a bite out of the apocalypse.
His Body, Mind, and Spirit were washed by the torrent of unleashed Mana and Essence, buoyed on winds that sought nothing but to destroy him wholesale. It was madness incarnate. He screamed, and Pit chimed in chorus with him.
Status Condition: Spirit Damage +5% > 12%
Status Condition: Mind Damage +5% > 5%
Status Condition: Body Damage +5% > 5%
Spin it! Pit shrieked. Must! Spin!
Together they tried to do as they had with the Ravager King, moving the power through Felix's abused channels and spinning his ring core with greater and greater haste. Pit's channels were far more hale than his own, but being converged only a fraction of the power cycled through the chimera. It was all Felix could do to keep Ravenous Tithe activated, his core open to the unending blast wave, that Pit had to push the power along their converged channels.
Felix could sense shifts within his core, but he hadn't the attention to spare. The violet power thundered across him. Each passing second stretched into infinity, a violent cacophony of noise and light. Deep, earth-shaking vibrations filled the blinding light, Harmonics that called to destruction and devastation. And the Archon's own Profane energy, twisting that music into something worse.
Status Condition: Spirit Damage +5% > 17%
Status Condition: Mind Damage +5% > 10%
Status Condition: Body Damage +5% > 10%
Ravenous Tithe!
The ruby form above his spinning core flexed and trembled, and the Maw's inert instincts prodded him, tell him what he could use and what needed to be vented. Spin and pull, burn and expel; it was a pattern so familiar it had begun to happen without his knowledge. The abyssal vortex within his ring core devoured what it could, but even it's unending hunger was not enough.
Notes of discordant fury shook through him, a burring twang that marred the explosion's subtle Harmonics. And then it was gone, and a relative darkness took the vast chamber.
TERRITORY-WIDE QUEST ALERT!
Congratulations!
The Nest has been destroyed! The threat of their influence has been ended!
Territory Contribution is being calculated...
Territorial Authority has been granted!
Congratulations: Eliza DuFont!
No!
Due to
Felix couldn't focus through the pain, the horror of it. And the rumbling did not stop. Blearily, Felix saw thatsomehowhe was rushing toward the ceiling. Somehowwait! The enormous, granite face of his Nymean ancestor was falling. The entire chamber was falling apart.
"Stone...shaping...!" With a final push of his Mana, the ground turned to putty beneath him. Felix was sucked beneath the surface just as the colossal statue hit.
Into darkness.
Pain and pressure.
Felix's constant companions, they had become his world. He couldn't remember the impact of the stone above, or even where his physical Body was; he was simply floating, hovering above the deep darkness within his core.
Pit coiled around him, wing's outspread, trembling while Felix clutched at the tenku. Whatever had happened, the both of them had manifested within the darkness of his solar system. Celestial lights illuminated them, from both his planetary Skills and the blue-white sun of his core, highlighted by a steady strobe of lightning prominences.
Power spun through him. Mana and Essence and flickering shapes of yellow-red, all of it swirling through his veins like deadly magic cocktail. A vortex of that wild mix spun above his head, ceaselessly devoured by the black on black abyss within his core. Still, Felix could hardly breath. His Aspects felt compressed and for a moment he feared he was being crushed to death by whatever stones were now certainly crushing his physical Body.
But no, he could see his Health. It was steady, if low. Yet the pressure continued, both pushing and pulling on him. And immense, terrifying pain that was hard to describe. Like his everything was being peeled, layer by layer.
He needed to cut it off, something to break its hold. Hehe needed to sever it.
Bastion of Will!
The pain swiftly retreated before the Essence of Sever that he'd Tempered into his Skill. Nearly all sensation fled, banished as Felix floated in the pregnant darkness of his core space. Even the light of his Skills and the flickering fire of his core ring were muted...until they disappeared too.
But the pressure remained.
It pulled at him, from all directions at once. A familiar, irresistible tug at his Mind, Body, and Spirit that suspended him. It was the same as when he'd first awoken in the Pathless' cathedral.
"Pit? Can you feel this too?" he asked, but there was no answer.
Pit was gone.
"PIT!"
Felix's voice, shouted with all his might, was without echo. Muffled as if he were in a room draped in thick cloth. All of this was terribly familiar, even the surge of fear that tingled in his belly. As before, his Mind quested outward, and Felix felt a smooth stretch of bonds attached to him. Pulling at him in all directions. He knew more now, and though he couldn't see the bonds, he knew what they felt like.
Threads. A million, a billion strings of connection. They felt smooth but that was only because they were each so tiny it was hard to separate them. They constrained him, though he could move his invisible limbs in the dark. But he was immobile, fixed at this point by the weight of them.
Felix tried to flex, to twist, but the threads would not shift. A weight greater than he'd ever experienced pulled at him, and he'd just had a sculpture the size of a mansion dropped on him. The only saving grace was that it was pulling him so evenly that Felix felt...balanced. As if no one thread were stronger than the others.
"What is this?" Felix tried to navigate toward his Bastion, to the small world he'd made of the mental Skill. But he remained, strung up in the dark.
"So you have found it."
Felix gasped in surprise. Belowahead?of him, a figure resolved out of the dark. They were little more than a silhouette, but it was one he recognized. The proliferation of joints in its limbs was a dead giveaway.
"The deepest part of you, unveiled," Vellus said, turning its featureless head as if appraising the space. "An endless darkness put upon by eternal, untiring forces. How...bleak."