Chapter 973 - Flame eater

“Oh, you’re up,” Sofia said, noticing the fluctuations in her link to Pareth. “How do you feel?”

Pareth gave a slow thumbs up in response, and proceeded to stand up and stretch.

“So, you were out for just about forty five minutes. We did get attacked by a local shade once, but getting rid of it was pretty simple…”

Sofia proceeded to discuss some logistics with Pareth, and transferred some things from her storage ring to his, before sitting down to consume one of the pills.

As soon as the blue pill entered her throat, she felt an intense need to sleep, the likes of which she had not felt since becoming a Lumian, and it kept getting stronger and stronger. She resisted for as long as she could, trying her best to stay awake just to see how long she was able to hold out. After about fifteen seconds her eyes closed on their own, and she was sound asleep.

She opened her eyes feeling slightly groggy, but feeling like she had just blinked and was teleported somewhere else. She was on a couch inside of a house, surrounded by the lit lightstones she had given Pareth moments before,while Pareth was at the window, peering through a gap between closed heavy curtains.

I’m up. She mentally warned Pareth. My eyes are all gone… Can I look?

Pareth nodded slightly.

Looking through Pareth’s eyes, Sofia could see outside. Currently they were in an isolated house on a hillside overlooking the city. The sky above was dark like ink, and long trails of blackness like dark pillars were all over the city. Following the ‘pillars’ down, Sofia saw what was at their base, long-fingered hands, blindly feeling their way around the streets, the rooftops, and inside of the buildings.

Everywhere in the city, shadows seemed to squirm, like bags full of worms, barely able to contain what hides within.

Sofia quickly opened up her system logs. In the short time she was out, Pareth had killed almost thirty ‘Shadows of the Dream Eater’.

Was what I killed some sort of vanguard for this? Or did this happen specifically because I killed it?

It’s clearly looking for us.

Some scattered hands were looking through the forests surrounding the city, but most still searched the city itself.

Have you tried fighting off the hands? Sofia asked.

Pareth fully closed the curtains and turned around. He nodded first, then shook his head.

Too strong?

Pareth answered with a few hand gestures that only Sofia could possibly interpret.

Your attacks just went through? I see… The hands looking through the forest were coming closer so this house won’t be safe for long.

Considering how fast the hands not on the ground were moving, it was likely that Pareth had used his signature skill’s teleportation to disengage. Sofia needed to choose now whether to fight or escape.

It took multiple skewering bolts to kill one shadow, and there are countless… I’d need to understand the enemy better first… How is the situation on the other side?

Pareth and Sofia both went to check another window on the opposite side of the house. There the sky was also pitch black, but no hands were scouring that part of the forest yet, as for the lesser shadows, it was impossible to tell if there were any hiding beneath the trees.

Sofia connected to her last remaining zombie eye, the very first one placed at the ECA facility’s entrance, deep in the forest on the opposite side of the city. There too, the sky was pitch black, but there was no sign of other movement.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

… Alright, I have a plan.

“Wha– Hey, hey, don’t look at me like that. I haven’t even said anything yet.”

Pareth shook his head, waiting for Sofia to explain her idea.

“Alright so… We’ve checked that this place was pretty isolated before. Honestly I have a feeling this city was here only because of the facility we were kept in. What I am getting at is, the explosion will probably not be too disastrous for the humans we are supposed to protect.”

Pareth shook his head again at the word explosion.

“Just a little 100 million mana bolt. I throw it at the sky, either it hits the dark thing directly and blows up, or it goes through, and I detonate it when it’s quite a bit higher to limit the damage. Either way after that we transpose to the effigy I left back at the prison again, that way the hands won’t know where to look for us, and we can see how they react to the blast, and if needed, we run the other way. Good?”

Pareth could only accept the idea.

To prepare the terrain, Sofia summoned an eye looking through the window to keep a view of the outside, and quickly coated the entire interior of the room with a thick layer of bones and gave it the blessing of permanent frame. If not for that, the entire house would probably burst into flames the moment Sofia started channeling the bolt.

“I’ll need about twenty seconds to charge up the bolt… I want to detonate about ten to fifteen kilometers up, ideally, and considering our distance from the city, the angle…”

She started gathering mana, and the usual sky-blue archangel’s bolt formed around her scepter.

Just a hundred million…

Truthfully she wanted to go all out but that would be too much especially when it was uncertain how effective it could be.

Twenty seconds later, she formed a hole through the bone shell she had created, and after sending Pareth to the halls, jumped outside through the window. Amidst flying shards of broken glass, Sofia aimed at an angle at the sky, and let the bolt fly. The hands in the city all turned toward the isolated house. The bolt was completely engulfed by the black sky.

But Sofia still felt the magic.

Now.

As the hands rapidly closed in, the closest ones almost already reaching the house, she triggered the bolt to explode, and transposed herself away from the strange black hand reaching for her.

At her landing point in front of the ECA facility, the ambient darkness was suddenly washed away by a flash of blinding light that turned the surrounding forest into a burned-down ashen hellscape in the blink of an eye.

Sofia turned to look up in the direction of the city, just in time to watch the permeating darkness the hands inhabited fighting back against a sun-like giant ball of blue fire suspended in the sky. The first shockwave had hit the darkness almost instantly, ripping it to loosely connected shreds of darkness still hanging in the sky. Each of those was one of the hands’ actual source. The probing hands that were out were gone, but thousand more emerged from the throbbing darkness, shooting up as if trying to surround the ball of fire.

Below, the city was already completely gone, wiped out from the map in an instant, reduced to a flaming pile of debris. Sofia watched the distorted air spread out from the city like a ring of death, blowing away the already burned-down forest in a haunting silence.

The countless hands continued to emerge from the remaining spots of darkness.

They are winning.

At the rate they were going, the hands would have fully surrounded the fireball like a cocoon before the shockwave could even reach Sofia. The secondary solar burst from the spine finally erupted, erasing thousands of hands, but their numbers seemed infinite.

Sofia did not wait any longer, turning her back to the explosion, she flew away.

The only system message she had received from this attack was enough to prove that it was a failure.

[You have successfully dispatched many Safe-level threats ‘Shadows of the Dream Eater’.]

That was it.

Either the hands are also simple shadows… Or they’re just a part of the bigger whole.

No matter what, it was not something Sofia knew how to kill for now. At least the darkness in the sky above her current location had been completely cleared up by the blast, which was enough. She flew in a straight line over burning forests until she was far enough that there were no more visible traces of the explosion, the shockwave never caught up to her.

There she flew straight up looking around to locate any signs of life. Far in the distance, she could see a few villages. There were even people there.

Perfect.

Silently flying toward the villages, Sofia checked the trial’s windows. It was still early in the afternoon on the ‘first’ day.

[Day 1 - Humans remaining: >98%]

The human population was already down more than one percent.