Chapter 34
Time slowed.
The tentacle-headed fiends converged on Harald.
He was the destructive nexus to their tightening perimeter.
Claws reached for him. Talons yearned to part his throat.
Soul Needles arrowed into him again and again, dozens at a time, enough to lay waste to an army of raiders, to reduce even the most stalwart of warriors to a quivering mess.
Harald hunched his shoulders, tucked his chin, and smiled.
Demoniac Body.
These weren’t demons, but Demonic Assimilation had drunk deep enough of Sythryxa, had fed him at the last, her stolen essence stored in the demonic reservoir.
He’d lost access to it, but the power had been waiting for him, hidden, reserved, ready, willing.
Harald drank deep of the demonic vitality and allowed it to fuel his transformation.
Form of the Black Throne gave way before this new power.
His body lurched upward, growing massive, his shoulders broadening, his skin dusking to pale gray, horns bursting back from his brow, talons of his own like knives of jet, shards of obsidian, and he felt his maw crowd with fangs.
His waist narrowed to an impossibly slender trunk, even as each muscle grew large and dense and flensed of all fat, so that he was become a walking anatomical study, a hideous demon embodiment of terror and death and destruction.
The monsters around him, having poured all their efforts into closing, into braving the gauntlet of void glass and reality warping, forcing a path across the shifting ground even as the very air leached them of strength, as their bodies were striated with wounds which bled their strength into their foe, these monsters, closing, those in the front ranks, possibly, for one second, realized they had made a mistake.
But it was too late.
Harald roared and leaped into their midst.
Bulled into the front rank, talons threshing through flesh, buoyed by the Well, his physical stats having jumped by +10.
It wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t even close.
But the monsters of the 39th Level didn’t realize just how badly outmatched they’d become.
They closed, roaring, and those closest tried to do something, to weaponize the very web of conduits he was draining into his Well, tugging on the burning threads in futile horror as he failed to dance to their puppeteering.
A talon slash opened an abdominal wall, loosing blue viscera.
Harald ducked another claw swipe, the attacker rolling right over his shoulder and flying as Harald straightened, then slashed another’s arm clear off at the shoulder, grabbed it by the wrist and backhanded another monster across its screaming face with the gory shoulder joint, dislocating its jaw and snapping its head right across.
Down Harald dropped, onto one hand, both legs coming up to kick to legs right in the knee, bending the joint backward, and then up he rose into a one-armed handstand as his legs continued to gyre around, the talons on his feet raking as they spun into a death-dealing vortex.
So much strength.
So much speed.
Such un-angelic agility.
Harald dropped into a crouch and bulled forward, arms spread wide to collect as many of his foes in one great crowd, lifting them off their feet and piling them back, catching more and more so that their faces were a blur before him, snarling and spitting and gnashing and biting down on his shoulders to no avail.
Across the room he charged, bodies falling beneath him from the back so that he stomped in chests and crushed skulls, but enough remained in his reaping grasp that when he hit the far wall, they pulped en masse, bones shattering, blood spurting, spines snapping, howls rising as Harald dove on, into the flesh wall he’d created, burrowing a yard into the corpses, his horns tearing them in twain.
With a savage cry of exultation he tore free, backing out of the collapsing corpse wall, blue ichor painting his head and shoulders and running down the great muscled slope of his back.
He whipped around, saw the monsters glaring at him, stunned, purple eyes wide, and laughed and leaped into their midst again as he unleashed another sickening pulse.
They did their best.
They attacked him. Slashed, gouged, bit. Their claws opened deep, painless slashes in his gray flesh, only for gray smoke to seep out as the wound closed thereafter.
A pulsing clamp of command fell upon his mind, seeking to coerce, to force him down to one knee. Harald felt the monsters try to inject doubt, hesitation, or simply base fear into his mindset, but they were unable to pierce the Crown of the Abyssal Tyrant’s protective power.
Harald darted through the thinning crowd, snatching up the tentacled monsters by the leg to hurl them away, punching holes clear through their chests, seizing their heads with both hands so as to palm their skulls into paste.
Movement on the floor caught his attention.
The corpses were sliding toward each other.
That gave him pause.
Even as the other monsters drew back, hissing in horror and panic, he watched, curious, as bodies began to flow into each other, melding, amalgamating, becoming something huge.
With each passing second, it happened ever quicker.
A hill was coagulating into a great gory mass in the huge hall’s center.
Harald unleashed a pulse over the trembling mass, but to no effect.
Void glass cut deep gashes in its corpus, and from these wounds new essence flowed into him, but ah—this new foe was monstrously huge.
Harald could intuit just how much vitality was somehow being collected within it.
Backing up, curious, happy, watchful, Harald watched the mound rise to the height of the ceiling. A flesh golem? But no—the hill remained sloped, rough-limbed, slicked with hide and blood and broken bone.
Harald cocked his head to one side.
The other tentacled monsters fled into their hidden chutes and shafts, so that in moments all that was left were the final bodies sliding across the floor with bloody squeaks to meld into the giant hill.
Huh. He’d sure killed a lot of them very quickly.
Harald flexed his talons, growing impatient. If this didn’t hurry up, he’d begin burrowing his way inside to find out what—
The hill shivered and then an aperture opened in its side. Talons emerged to push the opening wide, and a slender, white-skinned monster hauled itself out.
It was shorter than its brethren, slender, its tentacles having merged into a bony crest that flared up behind its head like a heretical aping of the Fallen Angel’s own halo as shown in paintings across Flutic.
A slender tail fell just to the ground, and its talons were tiny triangles, barely an inch long.
Purple eyes stared at Harald, who couldn’t repress a shiver: in those purple depths he saw a clarity of will, a lethality of intent, a monstrous desire to kill him that finally matched his own.
“Whatever you are,” rasped Harald, feeling the last of the demon essence in his reservoir running low, “let’s hurry this up.”
A void shard drifted across the slender monster’s chest, leaving a paper-cut of bright blue—and then the figure blurred and was gone.
Harald startled, barely tracking the darting figure as it raced to his side, and then he was doubled over its fist as it buried its knuckles deep in his gut. His shadowed flesh hardened, preventing the punch from actually puncturing into his intestines, but his breath exploded out in shock.
Then his foot went out from under him as it dropped and swept his ankle, and then it leaped, spun, and whacked its tail across his face with such force that Harald was lifted off his feet, set into a frenzy of spinning by the torque of the blow, to fly across the air and hit the wall.
The wall cratered beneath his bulk.
He bounced off it and dropped into a crouch. Chest heaving, he grinned as he raised his gaze to where the slender monster stood.
“Not bad.” Harald rose shakily to his feet. “My turn.”
He unleashed a pulse, his strongest yet, the tidal wave of nausea and disequilibration flooded out, washing over the monster who shuddered and stepped back.
Just as Harald summoned the darkness to consume it, blades appeared around its white form and began to slash and tear even as the Well continued draining it of its essence, drinking deeply, pouring power into Harald’s five Thrones.
The air shivered and gnashed around the white figure, who blurred again, bursting away and out wide, but this time Harald was ready.
He raced outward alongside it, slashing and punching at the fleet-footed form, which dodged his blows, swaying and ducking, to rake its tiny talons across his chest and lacerate Harald’s flesh deeply.
Shockingly so.
Another pulse was his savior. The power caused the slender figure to stumble, fall back, and Harald lunged, seized it by the ankle with both clawed hands, and with a roar, turned, lifting the monster off the ground, and pivoting on his heels, swung his foe into the wall as hard as he could.
The wall cratered again.
Roaring in fury, Harald didn’t release, but kept turning, raised the slender figure on high even as its tail battered at his wrists like a flexible steel rope, and brought it down upon the floor head first with all of his prodigious strength.
The flagstone buckled and shattered.
Harald fell upon the figure as it writhed, blood having burst out of its nostril slits, and detonated another pulse at point blank range even as he willed the darkness to consume it again.
The darkness obliged.
Harald found himself haloed in blades that slashed and stabbed even as he raked and tore at the childlike monster, tearing and gashing and rending and ripping.
The monster fought back.
It tore at Harald’s arms, cutting through shadowed flesh right down to the bone. Tore at his face, raking deep grooves through his cheeks and nose. Slashed at his chest.