Unbound-Chapter Nine Hundred And Fifty Six – 956

Sonata of Dominance!

Fiendstone bars erupted from the jagged pillar fronting the Echo of Noctis—it split, branching across its shoulders and neck like a restraining hand. Felix hauled back on a tether of lightning, zipping away from the creature’s blind swing. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

At its chest, the breach beside the ornate Omen Door sealed shut.

They made it in. Felix pasted a grin over the fear in his chest. Now we just wait.

FIEND! The Echo raged, its empty face crackling with unspent light. It clawed at its chest, sparking off the Fiendstone cage before it was repulsed entirely by a bloom of gold. The moonshards placed in a circle around the Omen Door shimmered, those golden threads binding them more surely than anything Felix could make. What Have You Done To Me?

“I didn’t do anything.” He stood atop a bolt of lightning, staring down at the rippling flesh of the once-god. “I wasn’t the one who pulled you out of the sky.”

LIAR!

The Echo raged and the smaller bars of Fiendstone cracked before it flickered into jagged, liquid shapes. The Echo phased through the cage, free now that it wasn’t hemmed in by Elowen or Ondine’s power.

The Fiend Is Responsible For All Ills!

It advanced on him, slamming its hands into the earth while its shadow-tendriled rear thrashed in a wild approximation of legs. Still, it moved fast, like liquid lightning.

Luckily, Felix had actual lightning.

Adamant Discord!

He zipped ahead in the air on tethers of electricity, pulling further away from the crater at Amaranth’s center. His Skills worked all the better for it. There was still some jittering and flickering within the song, but his Intent and Affinity pushed past it, sounding his Skills with greater fidelity with each swing away from the crater.

It was clear that the instability was worse there, just as it was clear that the instability somehow fueled this Echo. It slowed as they drew further away, though its ferocity didn’t dim in the slightest.

Only The Guilty Flee!

Clawing after him, the Echo shouldered its way over ridge and broken earth. Its empty face gleamed, a shadow light that spilled outward, spat onto the ground where it sank deep. Felix blasted ahead, toward the wave-like cliffs that surrounded the crater.

Face My Wrath, Fiend!

The Echo slashed at his back, but Felix evaded it with an increasing ease. Bonds leaped at his command and the elements shaped into shields, spears, and rings of blinding power. The creature wasn’t stupid—it still bore the Mind of Noctis, however tainted. The shadows it kepts vomiting onto the ground in its mad pursuit had sprouted, filling the crevices of the looming cliffs with shadowflesh. Moonbeasts, bodies studdied with jagged shards of celestial rock, rose out of the cliffs, forcing Felix to bank hard to evade them. They leaped after, a veritable tide of tooth and claw.

If I can get it away from the center, then I can keep it occupied way easier. Felix bared his teeth. I just gotta deal with these first.

Empyrean Embrace!

Ethereal jaws snapped upon them by the dozen, rending their flesh into coarse smoke and oiled light before funneling their Mana and Essence directly into Felix’s core space.

Inside, the Beast recoiled in disgusted agony.

Spit It Out! it demanded. Unclean Riot!

Felix grimaced against the thunder inside of him. It was the same litany it had called down when he'd devoured the unstable Eels.

“You’re telling me you can’t stomach these things either?” Felix slashed through a centipede with the face of a woman.

We Devour All—But They Undermine Us!

Felix flared Sonata of Dominance and fire and light expanded around him in an incandescent ring. Shadowflesh melted and moon shards tumbled away. “What does that mean?"

Ware, Scion!

A beam of bright violet-silver energy tore through the air, missing Felix by scant inches. It carved a molten line in the upthrust mountains, collapsing brittle stone upon shadowflesh and Felix both. He dodged aside, punching through the worst of it with explosive Strength, but moonbeasts died by the hundreds in a rain of midnight ichor. The Echo of Noctis pulled back its empty face, the same violet-silver light pouring from the chasm where its neck met its scalp.

"What the hell?” Felix slammed into the cliff, clinging for a brief moment. “She couldn't do that before!"

Rock tumbled and shadows burst from the cliffs. Monsters piled onto Felix, tearing him from his perch and he spun in a whirlwind, slashing through all of them before bursting free on a tether of lightning.

Unmaking Gathers In Its Empty Heart. The Beast reared up, its misshapen head lifted out of the abyss. Eradicate The Unclean Echo.

“Where’d it come from? What did the Hierophant do?” Felix threw a punch, Sonata singing through his channels, and a jagged pillar of Fiendstone erupted beneath the Echo’s face. It jolted back, uppercut by opalescent stone. It fell back.

Its Core. Our Power. The Beast sniffed. It Is Gone. Taken. Replaced.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on novelbuddy. Report any occurrences.

Felix looked to the moonshards and Omen Door, stitched into its hide with light. “Goddamnit.”

He had one guess for what replaced Noctis’ core. And one guess for where that core had gone.

Your Enemies Grow Stronger, Scion.

“Tell me about it.” Felix caught himself on another tether, his Bond to the sky flaring bright.

Your Hierophant Took The Core Of A Goddess And—

“Not literally, you turd.” The Echo shoved his Fiendstone pillar aside, the earth at its base crumbling to ash. “Tch.”

You Stole It! Thief Of Fates! Cardinal Beast! Liquid light welled within that empty face—a pool driven to froth. The Light Has Spoken! The Laws Demand It! The Fiend Must Die!

The Echo’s neck tensioned back, light boiling from its empty chasm, and its claws dug deep into the ashen earth. It screamed, and raw Dissonance sliced through stone and air—

“Tempest Fugit! Multicast!”

Fifty frozen lances shot down into the Echo's face, shattering against its slick hide in a corruscation of electrical storms. It reared back, bloody wounds opened wide across its neck and shoulders.

“You want the Fiend? You go through me!” His Companion screeched into the night. Pit beat his four wings, driving winds that scattered moonbeasts in all directions hundreds of feet away. Scylla and an entire army of Chimera dropped from the skies beside him.

“Dragoons!” Roland Dayne cried out. “Stand Together!”

A riotous cheer tore from the Chimeras’ backs, all of them in unison. “Spear of Tribulations!”

Roland Dayne and two hundred other Dragoons hurled their hands forward. A sky full of Spears dropped, pummeling into the Echo with the force of a thousand papercuts. The shadowy monstrosity threw up a limb, ichor running from tiny wounds that closed immediately.

Stinging Gnats! Is This All You Have To Offer, Fiend? Your Fleeing Back And Thugs Not Even Strong Enough To Wound Me For More Than Ten Heartbeats?

“Sounds like she wants more, boys! Let us give it to her!” Roland dove forward on the back of Thalgrym, the immense wyvern folding its feathered wings tight against its sides. “Oncoming Gale!”

A volley of windblades cut forward, congealing into a single massive Dragon’s claw. It slashed into the Echo, tearing chunks from its hide and worse, as hundreds of Dragoons dropped their own Skills in overlapping waves.

The Echo’s Body was strong, incredibly so, but it was a faded glory.

“Nimbus of the Moon!”

Pit’s voice was a thunder all its own, and a dozen moon beams blazed from the black clouds above. It seared into the Echo, chopping into its thrashing hindquarters—a heated knife into calimari.

Pit! Stop! I’ll handle this!

Pit squawked in alarm. Why?

Our friends. They’re all in that Door! You kill this Echo and I don’t know what happens to it.

His Companion loosed a frustrated caw. Then what do we do?

Focus on the moonbeasts. Keep them away from the ship.

Can we kill them?

With impunity.

That’s what I like to hear! Pit screeched a signal and wheeled in mid-flight. Scylla followed, a dove beside his enormous raven, while Thalgrym and his many followers peeled away from the Echo. Not without some choice words from Roland though. He swore he could hear his girlfriend’s father curses even over the Echo’s roars.

Unfortunately, the empty-faced monstrosity chased after them.

Wounded but regenerating fast, the Echo reached for the fleeing Chimera. Down the arc of the upthrust cliffs, across which a veritable army of moonbeasts raced toward a Fiendstone fortification—and a downed Manaship.

Not all the Chimera were as fast as Pit, however, and the Echo lashed at them with shadow tendrils that split the air with dark windblades of their own.

Felix wasn’t having that.

Its extended claw crushed into a Fiendstone wall he shaped up against it with bone-breaking force. Ichor poured like waterfalls upon the ground and the Echo whipped its empty face around to face him.

Fear. It took a deep breath, the hole where its face should be flexing like an enormous nostril. You Remain Beyond This Fractured Shell, Fiend. Your Tricks Have Weakened Me. I Cannot Conquer You…But I Do Not Have To.

I Need Only Kill Those Who Believe In You.

“Oh fuck that—”

Before Felix could enact any Skill, the Echo dissolved. Shadowflesh vaporized and liquified, settling into some strange combination between the two as it poured beyond his Fiendstone barrier. It chased after the Chimeras, a rolling mess of half-solid limbs splashing into the broken earth.

Straight for his people.

"Goddammit! Adamant discord!" Felix blazed forward, but somehow the Echo was growing stronger. Faster. He flared his Skill to close the gap, but it remained ahead.

What? They weren't approaching the crater. They were moving parallel to it, at best. So how?

And how could he stop it without killing the thing?

Pieces of the Echo slammed into the ground—a rolling tank-tread of vile Essence—but where it pummeled the earth, it tore through its own moonbeasts, absorbing them back into itself. Each abomination a jolt to its speed and apparent vitality, thickening its amorphous shape as dark light welled around its limbs and head. An aura of death.

“Get past this!”

A twenty-foot Lizard slammed into the horde, scattering the wave of moonbeasts with nothing more than a mighty stomp of its foot. “Precision Mines!”

The earth exploded. A line of fire tore up the ground across the Echo’s path, splitting the ashen rock all the way to the crater itself. The Echo of Noctis fell back and several hundred moonbeasts were instantly eradicated.

As was the earth itself. It crumbled, destabilizing the very ground. The unstable Mana poured from the crater down into the new chasm, filling it with a jagged light that sparked with a hissing static.

The Echo of Noctis reared up, its flesh grown as new limbs appeared on its side. Its empty face was ringed by new power—that same eldritch static that spat from the chasm.

Sonata of Dominance!

Astrum Ascendence!

Multicast!

Fiendstone hummed, a litany of struck bells, before it slotted into place and filled the open chasm. It dammed up the rush of unstable power. The Echo wilted, but only slightly.

"Don't break the earth," he shouted at Wendell. "We can't let it get near that unstable Mana!"

"Well, shit," Wendell said. "I'm out of ideas!”

“Use that engineer brain!” Felix sounded a handful of Skills within him, filling the air with a Dissonant Harmony that buzzed off of the very stone itself. “Keep them from the Manaship!"

The air ignited, a spiraling collection of windblades, ice shards, clinging shadow, and searing flame.

“I’ll do the rest.”