Astral Threads, Ch 24: Two Flaws (Patreon)

The five meteors tore across the distance and exploded with a concussive blast that shook the mountainside, swallowing the vines and the oncoming hounds in a bright explosion. A rain of ash from incinerated vines filled the air, blowing backward in the direction from which they’d come.

The vine hounds didn’t fare any better. Their six-legged forms were hurled away, half of their bodies gone from the impact. Where they had been, twisting white and sapphire runes filled the air as wisps of crystal flame flared and disappeared.

The spell was a revised version of Starfire that he’d decided to call Rain of Stars. It was based on a small swarm of star and flame runes linked together with force, space, and multiply runes woven into an augmentation pattern. Each meteor took ten essence, but it was far more powerful and widespread than the old version. It was also aligned better with the astral concept he was developing.

As the meteors cleared the way, he raced around the slope from where the hounds had come. An instant later, however, he had to slide to a halt as yellow-brown runes glimmered on stone pillars. They were creating a shield that blocked the path. Essence swirled inside the barrier in the same yellow-brown as the runes, the colors intermixed with darker splotches like rot on leaves.

Whatever Wood affinity these creatures had, it wasn’t a healthy version. It looked like rot, corrupting vines, or something similar.

The pillars supporting the shield had been placed on the sides of a trail that led to the Flaw, which he could sense just a quarter of a mile away. Scuffed footprints and claw marks showed the passage of Outsiders.

A brilliant lance of crystal flame formed in his hands as he focused on Shatter Aura and drove it straight through the shield, aiming for the pillar on the left. The barrier split apart with a loud crack and as the lance stabbed into the runes, the energy contained within erupted outward in a dull explosion. The pillar blew away in fragments and the shield thinned to only hazy lines in the air.

He drove the lance into the second pillar as well, just to make sure the curse ward was destroyed. A second explosion followed and the blast echoed out around the mountain with a thunderous roar as some type of sound-deadening effect was removed.

The lance dissolved, reforming into a sphere of flame between Sam’s hands as he leapt forward again, heading for the Flaw. Ahead of him, another half dozen Entangling Vine Hounds raced toward him, followed immediately after by a handful of more humanoid Outsiders that matched Krana’s description. He analyzed them as soon as they appeared.

Entangling Rotstrider. Outsider. Level 72.

There were five of them ranging from Level 64 to 81. Together with the hounds that were all around Level 60, there were eleven of them. A moment later, a single, much larger Outsider followed them, which had to be the overall leader.

Entangling Warstrider. Outsider. Level 112.

He was thirteen feet tall, with two legs that were wider than his body, each of them composed of writhing dark yellow vines. His torso and arms looked like the pale underside of bark, their surface covered with veins like unhealthy roots crawling across it. His hands were vines with glittering, thorny tips. It looked like there was one First Evolution here at this Flaw after all.

As he came into range, Sam scanned the area with Crystal Focus, but there were no other Outsiders present that he could detect. The other two stronger ones and the rest of the underlings were at the other Flaw. As he came to that conclusion, he didn’t hesitate. They needed to clear this area and then move on to the other one before the Outsiders could respond.

He reshaped the sphere of crystal flame in his hand into a lance that shimmered with green moonlight as he embedded a series of runes along the side and point, recreating the Spear of Silvas that he’d used once before. Spell Forging accelerated the process, the runes rippling into existence almost as quickly as he could form the crystal flame. When the spell was ready, he hurled it at the leader. It cut through the air with a whisper of tearing space.

As soon as it left his hand, his lunar bracer came to life, the surface shimmering with moonlight. Twenty-five glimmers in the shape of crescent moons appeared and sliced through the air after the spear, heading for the hounds and the lesser Outsiders.

The Outsiders barely had time to cross a quarter of the distance that separated them before the spells found them. The Rotstriders and the Warstrider tried to throw up a defensive shield, but their effort was pointless. The lance tore through the Warstrider’s chest and disintegrated half of his body as the crescent moons exploded through the rest in a cataclysmic eruption that wiped away half of the stones on the mountainside.

When the dust settled, Sam was floating in the air, hovering on a layer of hardened wind. The blast had even picked him up and pushed him away. His hair blew out behind his curved horns in a dark stream as his eyes burned like two brilliant stars. In his right hand, there was another gleaming green-tinged spear. In his left, there was a condensed sphere of flame spinning with a dozen star runes.

Nothing moved.

His eyes narrowed as he studied the slope in front of the Outsiders and took in the rainbow tear in the air that was just behind where they had been standing. There was a slice of darkness at the center like an opening into the depths of night and its presence pulled at him, promising him wonders untold.

Images of things he’d never seen flickered through his mind: towering trees as red as blood, plains rippling with purple stars that grew on slender violet stalks that crackled with lightning, and mountains that pierced the sky, their peaks stabbing upward into the void.

He pushed the feeling aside as his eyes narrowed, and then he turned to Krana, who was just coming around the curve of the mountain behind him.

“You got enthusiastic again, did you?” she grumbled. Her warhammer tapped against her open palm as she scanned the area and shook her head. “We should go. The other one is a good run away and they’ll have noticed this by now. We’ll need to get all of them before the Flaws will close.”

Sam glanced at the area again and then pointed the spear at the corpses, its tip skimming across the field as he called to the essence in them. A wave of yellow-brown essence stars tore free from them and hurtled toward him. There were several thousand of them as they changed to sapphire blue and struck him in the chest and flowed into his spirit. His essence constellation expanded as the stars took their place in the design. The fourth layer became more complete as it branched outward along the swirled path it was following. The pattern was a single rune on top of the three runes already formed below it, each of them a spiraling disk that merged into the one above and below, like a swirling nebula that was building a tower to the stars.

Essence Constellation (Fourth Layer): 27,925 / 45,000.

The total gain was just over 5,700 essence and it put him a little closer to completing the layer. He felt his attributes rising as well, but he ignored the details for now as he swept down on the current of air and searched for the auras on the corpses. The other Flaw was too far away and if he left them, they would dissolve before he returned.

It only took him a minute to touch each corpse and rip the auras free. The first two dissolved in his hands as he identified them. His mind filled with the flavor of rotting wood floating in a bubbling, hot mire that smelled of pine and pestilence. Vines shot through the mud, searching frantically for life. Yellow threads along the vines swirled with crackling vital energy that rushed through them like lightning. The taste was layered over mud and filth, but the energy within was part of Aster Fall, stolen when the Outsiders ripped through the World Seal, and so he put up with it.

You have identified an Aura of Vital Rot (Epic).

The aura was aligned with Life energy, with rot as a conversion factor from death to life. From the twelve Outsiders, he gained two Epic auras and six Elite ones. As soon as they entered his aura storage, he turned and headed back for the three hounds at the entrance, where he gathered two more Elite auras and another 650 essence. Interestingly, the vine hounds and the rotstriders all had the same aura, which implied some sort of racial connection.

The experience from the fight was building around them in a silver aura, but he ignored it. There were other things lying around the area to study, including more curse wards and some items that the Outsiders had brought, but all he had time for was to sweep some of the most easily moved things into a dimensional bag. Then he and Krana sprinted toward the other Flaw that was ten miles away.

A few moments into their run, Sam sent a message to the Sky Guards. An instant later, a Sky Guard swept down and picked up Krana in its arms. Its black crystal wings flared to the side as it rose again, carrying her upward. Two others flew down next to Sam, their hands hooking under his arms as they lifted him into the air. The mountain slope flowed away beneath them as they flew higher, speeding across the distance.

A startled yelp from Krana echoed through the air, along with Sam’s rumbling laugh. He reached out to the wind around them, pulling it close as he stayed ready to catch them both. Two minutes later, the canyon holding the second Flaw came into sight and then into the range of Crystal Focus. The golem holding Krana kept a grip on her as they hovered above the canyon, but the two holding onto Sam released him at his command.

He stood in the air on a layer of condensed wind, crystal flame curling around him as he pointed the green-tinged Spear of Silvas down at the Flaw below. He could sense two dozen vine hounds, a dozen Rotstriders, and the two First Evolution Warstriders, as well as another series of curse wards that covered the canyon in a diamond-shaped barrier. They arched from one side of the narrow opening to the next as they swirled with the same corrupted yellow light.

Krana formed a wave of Earth mana between her hands as she moved to attack. It looked like she wanted to be more in the middle of this one, since he’d leapt forward before she could at the last Flaw. She was just waiting for the wards to fall.

Sam raised the Spear of Silvas as he infused Shatter Aura through its structure, imbuing the green-tinged construct with a sharp, piercing force. Runes flickered around the spear as he added concepts for force and augmentation into its structure and then he poured a hundred points of essence into them, causing the spell to flare with a brilliant, sapphire flame.

His muscles bulged as he raised the spear above his shoulder and hurled it downward like a lance from the heavens, aiming for the central wardstone. The air around the spear split apart with a whistling roar as it descended. The shield around the canyon grew denser as it sensed the approaching attack, but it didn’t matter. The spear ripped through the shield with a hissing sound like tearing cloth and drove straight through the central wardstone.

An explosion of crackling, dark yellow light blew apart the center of the camp as the shield dissolved into a field of lashing tendrils that struck at everything nearby, whipping across the hounds and rotstriders, as well as the stones of the mountain. Unearthly, warbling howls rose up from the hounds as they were tossed away, their vines scrabbling at the canyon floor for purchase.

A wave of earthen spikes tore upward from the canyon floor as Krana released her spell. Dozens of slender granite spires tore through the Outsiders, piercing their vines as they stabbed through them. Some of the spikes shattered, but others held strong, lifting the hounds from the ground as they thrashed in the air. Her level was close to the two Warstriders at 105 and 110, and far higher than the rest. Except for the two First Evolution ones, the opposition they could put up was limited.

Sam didn’t have any other new spells to try out right now, but he had no interest in wasting time with these Outsiders. Instead of forming another spear, he activated the charges in both of his bracers, one after the other. Nearly a hundred crescent moon blades formed on his right side, followed immediately by two hundred starflame arrows on his left. His hands slammed together as he launched them all at the camp in a massive wave of sapphire and moonlight destruction.

It was the strongest attack from his bracers that he’d ever released.

The spell roared as they blasted down at the Outsiders, streaking down like the night sky was falling on the earth. When they struck, the entire canyon was enveloped in a rolling explosion that covered it in waves of flame and cutting moonlight from one side to the other. The echoes shattered the sky above the mountains, rolling across the slopes.

When the rumbling and flames faded away, nothing below moved.

Sam’s eyes were narrow as he studied the blasted canyon and the remains of scorched vines and stones that were all that filled it. The shimmering black of the Flaw at the end of the canyon tugged at his senses, its form clear now that nothing was in the way. The wardstones that had held up the other sections of the shield were gone, their structure reduced to rubble, and scattered fragments of the Outsiders were all that was left.

He raised his arms as he floated downward, crystal flame shimmering along his arms. Beside him, the Sky Guard carried Krana down as well. As they set foot onto the stones where the Outsiders had been and he looked across the devastation he had wrought, his heart twinged with a pulse of dark emotion. It was a grim necessity, layered over with a wish that things could be different.

Then he shook his head and let the thoughts go, breathing more easily as he took the brisk mountain air deep into his lungs. The Outsiders had come to his world to kill his people. They had probably already killed travelers along the road and they would have done more if he hadn’t stopped them.

“Let’s gather the experience and close the Flaws,” he said as he turned to Krana. “Then we can head back to our camp and check on your horse. I’ll gather the auras and see if there’s anything that could be helpful for the relic.”

“It is a kind gesture to mourn for the Outsiders,” she said quietly as she looked at him. “Don’t forget it, since it keeps you human. Without it, your actions would have no restraint, but this was necessary. They are monsters who would eat us as surely as the sun dawned today.”

Sam gave her a nod of agreement and then he turned to the work at hand as he began to search through the camp. There were 22 hounds, 12 rotstriders, and 2 warstriders. It took him a little while to collect the auras from them, but in the end, he had 5 Expert Auras of Vital Rot, another 18 Elite auras, and 6 more Epic auras, including one from the First Evolution Warstriders. The others were lost to the world and the 15% failure chance on the ability, but he could feel them flowing away into the energy of Aster Fall, returning to the source.

When he was finished gathering those, he raised his hand and curled his talons in, calling to the sparks of essence that flared in all of the corpses. A storm of yellow essence rose up from all across the canyon, blurring above the Outsiders in thousands of flickering streaks as they hurtled toward him. They slammed into his chest and merged into his essence constellation like a flood.

The rune of the fourth layer swirled as stars appeared along its design and it expanded, stretching further into the vast darkness that dwelled in his spirit like an echo of the void. The clashing force of battle lust and joy that always came with essence was there, but the rage was gone, as it had been since he’d become an Astral Hunter instead of a Voidborn.

The sensation rattled through his bones like the stars had gone to war, blasting apart his meridians and bones as it filled them in again at the same time. In total, there were just over 10,800 essence stars that joined the constellation, filling it with brilliant light as it moved closer to completion.

Essence Constellation (Fourth Layer): 39,410 / 45,000.

He felt his attributes rising and the wave of experience from the battle surged over his skin as well, combining to create a sparkling torrent of joyful energy, and he let them reshape his body as he looked at the Flaw at the end of the canyon.

It was already swirling with light as energy from the corpses flowed toward it and the auras of Aster Fall shot across the opening in shimmering lines of a hundred different elements. Pressure from the world weighed down on the area, forcing the Flaw to shrink bit by bit.

More bands of the elements flowed across the opening as they rewove the structure of the dimensional wall and then, with a sudden crack, the Flaw disappeared, leaving only empty space where it had been. Distantly, he felt the echo of the second Flaw closing as well, its presence disappearing from his mind. The voice of the World Core echoed in his mind.

You are Acknowledged, Guardian. Aster Fall thanks you for your efforts to protect our world.

You have gained two Marks. You now have 13. You also gain bonus experience for closing two Flaws.

You gain 520,000 Class experience. You have gained three Class and General Levels.

You are now a Level 44 Chaos Smith and General Level 144.

Class Experience: 6,542,000 / 6,700,000

Total Experience: 6,614,000 / 6,700,000

You have gained 6 Strength, 6 Wisdom, 6 Intelligence, 6 Aura, and have 12 free attribute points to assign.

A moment later, the surge of essence crackling through his body also announced itself, totaling up all of the energy he’d gained. There were just over 17,000 new essence stars in his fourth layer from the Outsiders. The increase was massive, more than he’d ever gained at once before. It wasn’t enough to get him all the way to the fifth layer, but his body crackled as he suddenly passed some threshold. At the same time, he felt the essence in his body flare as the stars in their constellation began to waver, rippling at the edges as if a wind blew through the nebula.

You gain 62 Strength, 84 Constitution, 15 Agility, 110 Intelligence, and 110 Aura.

Astral energy from the void swirled around him, pouring strength into him as his muscles, meridians, and mind expanded, and he tilted his head back as his hands curled into fists as he roared into the dark, his fangs bared at the sky. The astral threads around him resonated in harmony as they were pulled closer to him, attracted by the force of his call.

The crackling changes from the energy swept through him, his body adapting as he grew stronger and tougher, and then they faded away, leaving only a humming resonance in their wake. His mind was clear and as he drew in a breath, it came easily, flavored by the mountain snows. He let it out again as he studied the changes in his attributes.

STR: 268 Base (+10 with Amulet of Mountain Strength)

CON: 319 Base (+20 with Belt of Emerald Vitality)

AGI: 115 Base (+20 with Boots of Elemental Gliding)

WIS: 238

INT: 498 (+6 with Starflame Bracer)

AUR: 498 (+6 with Starflame Bracer)

CHA: 120

You have 12 free points to assign.

The rippling at the edges of his essence constellation suddenly made more sense, since his Charisma was just below the 25% required to maintain his presence of mind. Without hesitating, he threw the 12 free points into it, increasing it to 132. Immediately, he felt his sense of self expand and the stars in their courses became still and bright, their pattern firm as a wave of energy and purpose flooded through him.

Despite that, however, a deep frown etched his forehead as he studied his Charisma and took in the changes that had just occurred. He’d thought he had a buffer in case of a sudden increase, but he’d underestimated exactly how much essence he could gain from the Outsiders near a Flaw, at least the First Evolution ones. The ones he'd killed before, including the Terror and the other bounties near Highfold, had given him far less.

He wasn't sure why it was different this time. Perhaps the rotstriders' Life alignment meant they had more essence than others or that it was easier to gather somehow. Some Outsiders might have different essence patterns than others.

The improvements were massive, but while he was delighted with the progress, it meant he was going to have to drastically change his plans for leveling. All of his available free points would need to go into Charisma for a while. As he stretched his muscles, a crackling sense of strength responded and the air around him vibrated with the energy contained in the movement. He looked over at Krana and he wasn’t surprised to see that she was occupied with her own levels. She had jumped up to Level 105.

The boost in his attributes perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since the essence constellation system was a parallel to experience. He had attributes from both, which meant that it needed to keep up with his regular leveling.

The demanding sense of battle in his blood made him clench and relax his fists again as he looked into the distance, down toward the road that stretched away in the distance. Between the essence, the auras, and the marks, hunting Flaws had just moved up to the top of his list.

“Let’s see what else is on the way to Runekeld,” he said with a low rumble.