Depthless Hunger

Chapter 245: Struggling with Coordination

No matter how Kai struggled, he couldn't find an edge against the onslaught. When he tried to attack, the demon impaled his arm with another bone spike, and when he tried to move away, the next spike hit his leg. Behemoth's Heart was desperately just trying to stop all of the shards of bone inside his body as they tried to tear him apart.

Strength and determination wouldn't be enough to get him out of this one. He couldn't think of a plan, either. It was hard to think of anything through the pain.

In his bloody vision, Omilaena seemed to glide out of nowhere. Her knife nearly cut the demon's throat and he barely blocked her strike with his forearm. But her real intent had been a syringe that plunged deep into its back. The demon whirled and probably would have struck her, but the bite Kai had taken out of his arm slowed him down.

For a moment his vision went black and he struggled to regain focus. When he could see again, the demon had retreated, but he heard a scream of pain and rage. Omilaena hadn't followed up, instead crouching over Kai and pouring something into all his injuries. It burned, but the acid felt better than the bone shards.

"Took me a little while," she said with a grim smile. "We need to keep coordinating."

"Right. Meet with Zae Zin Nim."

Kai got to his feet unsteadily. There were no more bone shards and his body was fighting-fit, but Behemoth's Heart couldn't repair this much damage within the time frame of a fight. He'd have to be cautious and choose his next moments carefully.

Through all their fighting the fortress had been largely demolished - the black obelisk stood slanted from a pile of rubble. Zae Zin Nim was retreating down the side of the mountain, pressed by the scythe beast and barely able to defend against more ranged bone shards.

Omilaena and Kai leapt in together, defending her and driving back the largest construct. With their backs to one another, they were able to fend off all the projectiles. Though Omilaena tried to hit one of the ranged constructs with a needle, they seemed to be too fast. The little constructs were skittering through the trees in the valley now, emerging just long enough to launch their shards.

Some distance away, the demon grimaced and tore the syringe out of his back. Whatever effect it had on him, his veins stood out bright purple but he seemed to be ready to fight again. They didn't have much time.

"He's counting on his constructs to provide support," Omilaena said. "Kai, you take care of them."

"How?" he asked.

"Overwhelming force." Then there was no more time to talk, because the demon attacked along with all of his remaining constructs.

Omilaena grabbed both Kai and Zae Zin Nim and hurled them away before she began to retreat. At first Kai thought it was just a delaying tactic, then while in the air, he realized the truth. Zae Zin Nim had moved to the demon's flank, away from the scythe beast, and Omilaena was ready to intercept. Both were entirely vulnerable on the forest side, where the fast constructs were ready to launch more projectiles.

They were counting on him to cover them. Kai unleashed Baleful Breath at its full strength, not aiming for any specific target. The rush of smoke and fire hit the forest and flooded in all directions. Trees turned to ash, the earth shook, and every last one of the ranged constructs was consumed.

For a moment even the demon hesitated, looking toward the destroyed valley. While he was distracted, Omilaena came down hard on the scythe beast's back, breaking its spine. After a moment, the demon shifted in to fight at melee range.

Kai landed on the side of the mountain and turned back, looking for his opening. He understood the demon's tactic: he realized that Kai wouldn't risk injuring his allies and so remained at close range. Even without constructs, the demon was doing a good job fighting them. Zae Zin Nim was slower due to her stomach injury and Omilaena had taken more than a few cuts during the fighting. None of the demon's injuries slowed him much, so he was pressing both of them back.

So Kai went to join them, just to buy time for another plan. Unfortunately, the demon was no fool, and clearly experienced with fighting multiple opponents. He danced between them, playing their positions against one another, forcing them to hold back to avoid harming one another.

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In a fight like this, Kai felt especially handicapped, since his strongest techniques would risk the others. Could he retreat and hope they could make an opening? But just the two of them with their injuries were struggling, and their opponent would surely be expecting something like that.

"Look out!" Omilaena cried. She leapt atop the pile of rubble and exhaled an enormous cloud of blue smoke. Kai and Zae Zin Nim instinctively retreated, even though it was her familiar poisonous smoke.

Her warning gave the demon plenty of time to dodge aside, and Omilaena wasn't stupid enough to do something so senseless. Then he probably knew what she was doing... but Zae Zin Nim was struggling. The smoke separated their group and the demon isolated her, trying to drive her back into the poison.

Kai couldn't jump in, not when the demon had proved so good at intercepting such attacks. Instead he'd have to trust that Zae Zin Nim was smart enough to be playing along. Kai retreated around the other side of the poison cloud.

Through the smoke he could see Omilaena jumping in, just in time to save Zae Zin Nim. But the demon fought confidently next to the poison, doing his best to force Zae Zin Nim into it. They wheeled around the edges, wisps of smoke spreading around them in the melee as the demon slowly gained control.

Kai emerged from the smoke, deceptively slowly until his Tyrant's Claw hit the demon in the back. This time it bit deep, knocking the demon forward with a cry of pain.

That wouldn't have been enough, on its own, but the other two struck almost instantly. Omilaena plunged a syringe into his neck and Zae Zin Nim struck his heart with her palm. For a moment the demon swayed between the three of them, then its bone gauntlets crumbled to ash and he fell to one side.

They dropped the next second. Zae Zin Nim went down to her knees, panting for breath and favoring her stomach. Kai just sat back, propped up on his arms. He was still mostly inside the poison cloud, but it just tasted sort of sweet. The demon hadn't known that they'd built up an immunity to Omilaena's poison, which had been the plan all along.

"Glad you caught on," Omilaena said. She was bleeding into her dress all over, but she seemed to recover first. "We should use that trick in the future, a bit more subtly."

"Just our... movements..." Zae Zin Nim was still catching her breath. "...more effective..."

"And you did a great job pretending to be driven back."

"Wasn't entirely... pretending..."

Now that his body wasn't being strained to its limits, the thumping of Behemoth's Heart was healing him rapidly. Kai didn't want to fight any serious opponents soon, or even a moderately strong monster, but he was able to get to his feet without too much pain.

"What do we do with the body?" he asked. "Do the elves want it, or is it useful for anything?"

"I say you eat it," Omilaena said.

"Is that okay?"

Zae Zin Nim sighed and turned away. "I'm not looking anymore, go ahead."

So Kai bent down and snapped up the demon's body with Isulfr's Bite. It wasn't a monster, so he expected nothing, yet he felt some sort of power flowing in his mouth. Certainly no magical ability, but was something shifting? He was puzzled until he looked at his soul.

Monstrous Hunger had been stuck at kappa rank for a long time. Now it had finally increased.

Did his hunger apply to other people as well? In a sense that was obvious, since monsters wanted to eat everything. He'd certainly eaten various animals and even people without gaining any power. Maybe it was just a side effect of his monstrous soul that he'd need to keep in check... or maybe it was something else. There was still so much he didn't know, after all.

While they recovered, Omilaena had moved back to the pile of rubble. She struggled to budge the obelisk until Kai came to help. Even though she was quite strong with D-rank Physique, it was hard to move a stone object that long and unwieldy. Eventually they got the dark obelisk separated from the rubble of the fortress.

"I was going to suggest we do some random damage to make the theft less obvious," Kai said, then looked around the valley sheepishly. "Guess that's not necessary anymore."

"Actually, we can still follow that plan." Omilaena bent down beside the obelisk and drew a line around the side with one finger. "The important components of this with the anti-glamour chakra are all in the upper part. I think the rest is just a support structure."

"Got it." Kai smashed the lower half of the stone pillar and then, while Omilaena carefully picked up the important part, scattered the rubble around the valley. When he was done, he thought it looked like something had just destroyed the entire fort, not specifically come to steal part of it.

Zae Zin Nim had returned to her feet and was apparently just staring down the valley. When he got close, she turned back to him with a somber expression.

"I don't sense anyone watching," she said, "but there's some kind of outpost further south. They might have sensed the battle. We should go."

"No reason to delay, right?" Omilaena swept up beside them, the elven totem in hand. "Anything else we're missing?"

"No. I believe our mission was successful."

"Then here we go." She broke the totem in half and magical winds closed around them.

The moment of disorientation, as if the world was folding in on itself, was just the same as before, so Kai recovered even faster. Yet the world that blurred into sight was nothing like what he expected, not the jungles or the mountains. There was a line of mountains to the south, but otherwise he saw only sand.

Nothing but desert on all sides.