Chapter 68

  A crooked crescent of bodies ringed the portal—scores of warped, one-eyed creatures arrayed like a waiting execution squad. Their silhouettes were unmistakable: vaguely humanoid outlines pulled into wrong proportions, limbs stretched or knotted into unnatural angles, skin ballooned and tightened by internal pressures their structures were never meant to bear. It was as if Orrhal had sculpted them from molten flesh and hate, then cooled them badly, leaving cracks in the form of bulging veins and twitching muscles.

  But what dominated everything else—the thing Raime felt even from a distance—were their eyes.

  Huge. Swollen. Glossy orbs that ballooned from their skulls, some protruding out so far he was wonderning how they weren’t faliing off. They throbbed subtly, pulsing with a cold violet sheen that prickled across Raime’s own psyche.

  He didn’t need to be a genius to guess where these things excelled.

  They're specialized for ranged mental attacks…

  He had a core now. A powerful one forged by fusing will and soul into a unified vector. His mental resistance was leagues beyond what it once was. But even so… he remembered the agony earlier—when only a handful of these creatures had focused their gaze on him. Pain that cut deeper than flesh, pain that slid under the skin like a thousand hooked needles.

  If ten could shake him…

  There were hundreds here.

  A million ants can kill an elephant. And I’m not an elephant.

  He was thinking furiously as he soared above the forest, body streaking like a thrown spear, the air behind him still carrying the distant echoes of the titanic clash between Neimar and Orrhal. The reverberations of their fight disturbed the wind itself—currents bending, sounds cracking through the canopy like invisible whips.

  He had minutes. Not hours. Minutes before Orrhal, Neimar, and the pursuing mutants reached this clearing. He could already feel the tremors of their approach behind him.

  He needed a plan., and fast.

  He knew something, despite all his progress, all his recent power ups, he couldn’t make it alone. He needed numbers, an army of his own.

  And morality… morality could wait.

  Raime exhaled once, sharp and steady, then let his consciousness expand. The core pulsed inside him, unified and silent, it didn’t wait for a command, it simply followed his will, because it was his will and soul manifest.

  And he wanted one thing right now, an army to keep the corrupted creatures occupied and cross the damn portal.

  He pushed downward—not with force, but with a net. His awareness unfurled across the treetops, diving through the canopy into the shadowed undergrowth, brushing across minds like cold fingertips across taut threads.

  Tier 1 minds. Tier 2 minds. Some predator, some prey, some ancient beasts sleeping in hidden roots. Fear in all of them.

  He seized the strongest.

  And bent them sharply, violently into obedience.

  And with them manipulated the weaker, the law of the jungle was the only thing they knew, so the roars of the most powerful roused the others.

  The backlash was immediate: animal terror pouring into him like choking fumes, impulses of run, hide, flee the nightmare. He nearly flinched. Nearly. But he refused to yield.

  He had no choice.

  “Run,” Raime whispered, voice barely audible above the rushing wind. “Run towards the portal, kill all the corrupted in your path.”

  From the distant forest below, he felt an answering shudder—hundreds of feet striking the ground at once, tremors rippling outward like a forming earthquake.

  Beasts began to gather.

  Huge alien boars. Towering felines covered in shells. Centipedes the size of cars. Dozens of venomous little beasts. Worms that slithered with patterns glowing along their backs. Dozens became hundreds. Hundreds became far more.

  Some resisted.

  He crushed their instincts until they bent.

  He felt terrible about it. That didn’t matter now, he had no time to waste.

  A familiar spark brushed his mind—thin, curious, but known.

  The young drokhar.

  Raime anchored the bond, his thoughts reaching through the fog of slaughter and fear.

  I need you friend.

  A pulse of worry. Of loyalty. Of hesitation.

  There is a great battle ahead. Please, bring your kin.

  The answer came as a rumbling, low roar from deep within the woods.

  Good. Very good.

  His pulse quickened. The Drokhar were formidable beasts, with their fighting prowess they could occupy a great number of Orrhal’s army. He knew that he was sending them to die, but everything was on the line right now, it was a low price to pay for fulfilling his promise.

  The stampede was beginning. He could feel the ground shaking, cracking under the weight of hundreds of beasts moving at once—panicked, terrified, but controlled by those above them, the Tier 2 alpha beasts he had already dominated.

  He had some pawns of his own.

  Now he needed more.

  Raime shifted downward, spotting one of the largest centipede beasts—a monstrous creature with a segmented body long at least twenty meters, mandibles as big as scythes, and sharp legs beneath armoured ridges along its sides.

  Its mind was simple. Brutal. Easy to seize.

  So he did it.

  The beast screamed and rose through the canopy like a launched spear, He destroyed the trees in his passage with bone-grinding force, sparks and white flames exploding all around. It reached him in seconds, and Raime dropped onto its broad back, sitting cross-legged as if taking his place on a throne made of nightmares and fury.

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  His weapons floated around him—Tetra Unum and Thunk circling him like hungry voltures.

  His mind expanded again.

  “Go.”

  The centipede beast surged forward, rising above the tree line. Raime’s awareness plunged into the chaos below. He felt the push and pull of every mind under his dominance—some strong, some brittle, some already beginning to break under the weight of terror as he forced them toward certain death.

  He felt sick.

  But he did not stop. He could not.

  Because if he failed, all this efforts, all this pain would have been for nothing. He would die. Neimar’s dream would die. Along with thousands of ithurians.

  Below, the first wave of beasts burst from the underbrush—an uncontrolled stampede of muscle, claws, horns, chitin and panic. Many trampled each other immediately. Others smashed trees apart in their panic. The metallic trees seemed to deflagrate with sparks and flames flaring all around, smoke rose in towering columns through the forest.

  Behind them came structure: the larger predators, the drokhars, and the commanded Tier 2 beasts driving the rest forward like shepherds sweeping a terrified herd.

  The roars shook the clearing.

  The deformed creatures around the portal turned as one. Hundreds massive eyes widened, violet light flaring with blinding intensity.

  Mental beams lashed outward.

  Dozens of beasts fell instantly—mid-stride, mid-jump, mid-roar— collapsing like puppets cut from their strings. Some convulsed, frothing at the mouth. Others went silent immediately, their minds snuffed out.

  Raime flinched at every death, the feedback slamming into him like waves of nausea. Every extinguished mind echoed through the network he had created, a collapsing node pulling at his psyche.

  Hold, hold, hold—

  It was a massacre. A battlefield where cavemen charged trained soldiers with machine guns. The beasts didn’t stand a chance from a distance.

  But that was fine.

  Because they weren’t meant to win.

  They were meant to keep them occupied while Raime flew around and got more beast under his control, pushing more and more out of the forest toward his enemies.

  And they did. They did more than just keeping them occupied

  Once a sufficient number of beasts crossed half the field, their bodies blocked the line of sight of the creatures behind them. The mental pressure lessened. The eye-mutants tried to reposition, but it was too late—a wall of living flesh slammed into them with undeniable force.

  The front line crumpled. Bodies smashed together. Bones crackled. Beasts tore into deformed limbs, and mutated claws ripped into animal hides. It became a vortex of violence—blood and ichor spraying upward like mist under the sunlight.

  More beasts poured out of the forest. More died. More crushed their own kind in their panic. But they kept coming. Too many. Far too many to stem.

  And then, with a thunderous roar, the adult drokhars broke through the opposite side of the forest.

  White fire crackled along their fangs. Trees shattered as if made of thin glass. The young drokhar was among them—smaller, but fast, darting between its elders with a snarl that shook Raime’s heart.

  They hit the flank of the portal’s guardians like a meteor strike—sweeping in arcs, carving through deformed flesh, smashing apart skulls, severing bulging heads with snapping scythes.

  The pressure on the portal army finally snapped.

  They divided—half turning to meet the drokhar charge, half struggling to fight the stampede.

  Yes. That’s at least half occupied by the stampede. The drokhar are handling another good chunk. I only need a moment to go through. I am near.

  Raime leaned forward on his mount.

  “Take me above the portal,” he murmured. “High. Fast.”

  The centipede beast obeyed, gaining altitude with a sinuous movement that sliced the air. They rose in a steep arc, soaring above the battlefield. The portal shimmered in the distance—a shimmering tear in reality, flickering with light.

  It was so close.

  Raime could almost taste freedom.

  Almost.

  Then the wind changed.

  Cold. Violent. Displaced.

  Neimar and Orrhal were drawing closer.

  Raime looked back—and froze.

  A wave of violet and white light ripped through the forest behind him. Trees bent. Ground cracked. And between the spiraling energies, he glimpsed the two figures:

  Neimar, burning like a collapsing star.

  Orrhal, radiating hunger and malice in equal measure.

  They were coming.

  Fast.

  And the ten elite mutants—the physically enhanced ones that had followed Raime all this way—were even closer, sprinting through the trees on deformed legs that left cratering footprints.

  Raime gripped his mount’s back.

  “Faster. Faster!”

  They shot upward—

  —and the first mental barrage struck.

  It wasn’t aimed at him.

  It was aimed at the centipede.

  A dozen beams lanced into its skull like heated needles smashing through porcelain.

  Raime felt the creature’s mind spasm despite him reinforcing it.

  They were sixty or seventy meters from the portal now, Raime prepared to dive.

  Another volley of attacks hit the centipede and this time they reduced its mind to mush in a second, the backlash hitting Raime was just the preclude for the pain that was about to come.

  “No—!”

  The beast spasmed violently. Its body buckled, twisting in the air.

  Then it dropped in a freefall.

  Raime clung to its back and used it to shield himself from the gaze of the creatures as gravity seized them, as the world rushed upward. His weapons whirled around him, trying to form a defensive shell, but there was nothing they could do to for now.

  Raime’s core flared, his divided mind were onto the task of planning his next move when he felt many creatures approaching from below at high speed.

  There were more!

  Another group of seven physically enhanced creatures was about to crash into him mid-air. So he jumped to the side, pushing his dead mount toward three of them and evading the others.

  Many more were waiting for him mixed with the giant eyed ones.

  Raime’s weapons started spinning, he added two more spinning in front of him. Blades similar to the the Tetra Unum were forming a shield to block him visually, while he took out items similar to grenades from his spatial ring and in a moment he primed and flung them in a cluster of enemies below.

  His parallel minds were creating dots of energy around himself, one of the simplest form of attack that Neimar taught him. One of the only he could manage to create with his new core.

  The centipede struck the ground like a fallen plane, crushing some of the creatures underneath, the explosives went off on contact with groups of enemies close to the portal, some were intercepted mid-air but others landed with a flameless blast and opened a larger space in front of it.

  Raime now was being bombarded from the sides by an increasing number of mental attacks, he was finding out that he was much more resistant to it than he expected. Every one felt like a needle instead of a hammer, but enough of that will take him down too.

  He was approaching the ground fast, so he pushed himself forward with his telekinesis and opened his shield, allowing the blades of the three Tetra Unum he was controlling to transform his surroundings into a blender.

  Limbs, heads eyes and blood was all that was left in his wake, he was moving fast toward the portal, the two Earth trees that twisted around it felt like a promise, he was going home.

  Just a little more…

  A creature came crashing into him, Raime felt its approach and struck it it the chest with an open hand strike, breaking bone and sending it flying against another enemy. Two more were on him by the time he managed to take a step, and many more were close by, he was surrounded.

  A blast of telekinesis created some space, the weapons spinning were making short works of the big eyed creatures around him, but still many were targeting him from afar, the damage he was accumulating wasn’t trivial, he was using his energy to protect himself from the most of it, but even his new reserves were starting to dip low.

  Raime held Thunk with both hands, the weapon getting blocked by a malformed claw, and despite the energy reinforcing it, deep scratch marks now adorned its surface. Raime threw it and Thunk found its mark into the eye of one of the many enemies around him. He used telekinetic blades, push and bare handed attacks to keep all the enemies at bay. Only ten seconds since he touched the ground passed and he managed to advance not even half the distance he needed from the portal, but that time wasn’t spent in vain, he killed many of the long range attackers and finally he managed to condense enough energy for the basic beam attacks he was preparing. The many dot of silvery-gold light around him flared brighter, when another claw came to his throat, Raime leaned on the side and punched the creature on its flank, making it airborn, opening the view of another attacker just behind it. One of the dot released a beam of pure energy, bathing his surroundings in a warm glow, it went in and out the head of a physically enhanced creature, killing it on the spot. Not only that, a line of dead or injured creatures fell behind it as well.

  Raime didn’t have time to be surprised by the power of his now core, he sent two more dots to release their payload in a sweeping ark, severing many corrupted in half, but only wounding the physically stronger ones.

  He took four more steps forward when he felt the clash between Neimar and Orrhal besides him. A detonation like no other glassed part of the clearing and the forest, not distinguishing between friend or foe.

  He created a barrier to protect himself from the blast and took a moment to look at the devastation.

  Raime froze on the spot.

  Orrhal was watching him, and his teacher was nowhere in sight.

  Raime’s minds came back into a single one, giving him more time to think. He saw clearly the glee in Orrhal distorted visage as it raised one arm and pointer a single finger at him.

  A hyper compressed formation of energy was twisting in front of Orrhal. The violet light filling his vision.

  “Die.”