Chương 87: Chapter 74 – Prismatic Conduit

Cade stood in the center of a spreading slick of violet bile, surrounded by writhing flesh. The broodmare's vomit sizzled against the ash around him, thick and viscous and crawling with movement. Long, glistening bodies churned through the mucus at his feet, each one a little shorter than a meter, thrashing with wet hunger. Corrupted swamp leeches ringed him on all sides. Their mouths split open into rings of jagged teeth as they lunged for him from every direction.

Cade moved before the nearest one could latch onto his leg. His spear snapped forward in a short, brutal thrust and punched straight through the center of the closest leech. In his [Essence Sight], Cade caught the thin thread of green running down its central axis and drove the point directly through it. The leech spasmed once, then went limp. For the briefest moment, Cade saw something peel away from the corpse. A thin strand of pale green life essence pulled free from the dead leech's body and drifted toward him.

Its color bled out as it crossed the air, fading from pale green to near-transparent before it fizzled apart entirely a few feet from his chest. A System notification tugged at the edge of his vision but he ignored it. Now was not the time to let the System clutter his sight with kill confirmations. Cade lurched forward as something slammed into his back. One of the leeches launched itself onto him, its slick body wrapping across his bare shoulders. He felt the ring of teeth clamp down at the base of his neck.

Its teeth scraped uselessly against his skin, unable to find purchase. He twisted sharply, jerking his shoulder and whipping his torso sideways hard enough to dislodge the thing. It peeled off him in a wet slap and hit the ash at his feet. His spear punched down an instant later. Another clean strike and another dead leech. A deep, guttural roar rolled over him and Cade's head snapped up. The broodmare's gaping maw was already above him.

Its massive body surged out of the ash in a towering arc, maw spread wide as it came crashing down toward him. Jagged black teeth lined the inside of its mouth in dense rows, each one the size of a dagger and slick with violet saliva. Cade reacted on instinct. He brought the shell up over his head and shifted a half step to the side just as the broodmare's mouth came down. Its teeth scraped against the shell with a sound of metal grinding against stone.

The impact rattled down his arm and Cade felt the essence tether linking him to the shell tighten instantly, siphoning even more essence from his channels to absorb the force and reinforce the shield. Between his sidestep and the shell deflecting the broodmare's strike, its maw crashed into the ash beside him instead of around him. The broodmare's teeth gouged a trench into the ground at his feet and Cade didn't waste the opening. He drove his spear into the side of its exposed flesh.

The point slid between two pale armored plates and buried deep. The broodmare shuddered. Cade ripped the spear free and stabbed again and again, frantically trying to inflict as much damage as possible. Purple blood spilled in thick streams across the ash, hot and foul-smelling as it poured from each wound. But through his attack, the leeches kept coming. They slammed into his legs, climbed his back, threw themselves at his arms and shoulders in desperate waves.

Their teeth scraped against his skin in a constant gnashing frenzy, useless but relentless. Cade tore another one apart with the butt of his spear and drove the point through a fourth. Above him, the broodmare reared back again before coming down for another strike. Cade saw it coming and knew immediately he wasn't going to dodge. There were too many leeches on him, swarming his limbs and preventing any quick movement.

They clung to his legs, their bodies rolling over one another in a mass of purple flesh and gnashing mouths. Their teeth still couldn't pierce his skin, but that hardly mattered now. There were too many of them. Too much weight. Too much movement tangling around his ankles and calves, dragging at his footing and cutting off every path of retreat. The broodmare's maw descended like a collapsing wall. Cade barely got the shell up in time. Its jaws slammed into the shield with a deafening crack.

The force drove him down and his legs buckled under the impact, the broodmare's weight crashing down through the shell and into his bones hard enough to make the ground beneath him shudder. The shell held, barely, its curved bulk wedged between Cade and a mouth full of blackened, razor-sharp teeth. But the broodmare couldn't bite down on him. Not with the shell in the way. Still, that didn't mean he was safe.

Its weight bore down on him relentlessly, a mountain of flesh and muscle trying to crush him into the ash beneath its maw. Cade's left arm trembled under the strain, every muscle in his shoulder and back screaming as he fought to keep the shell raised. The essence tether flared again. A hard, hungry pull tore through his channels as the shell siphoned essence to reinforce itself under the pressure. The drain was worse this time, deeper than before.

Cade could feel the shell repairing microfractures as they formed, drawing directly from him to keep from splintering apart under the broodmare's bite. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. His jaw clenched. Leeches writhed over his feet and up his legs, slamming themselves against him in a frenzy while the broodmare tried to grind him into the ash.

Cade drove his spear down blindly into the mass at his feet, skewering one, then another, but it barely made a difference. There were too many. His breathing tightened. This was bad. This was really bad. The worst part was that he could end this. He knew he could. The white flames would erase all of this. The broodmare. The leeches. Their corruption-filled bodies would crumble under one good burst of desolation and this entire fight would be over. But he couldn't do it yet.

He didn't have the time or focus to gather the essence in his channels. Conjuring the white flames wasn't instinctive. Not yet, at least. It wasn't like flexing a muscle or triggering [Hyperfocused Meditation] with a thought. It wasn't a true skill. Not something he could summon in the middle of a fight. He needed time to focus. A moment to breathe. Just a bit to pull the essence together the way Vorduun had shown him. He gritted his teeth as the broodmare pushed down harder, the shell fracturing above him.

If he just had even a few seconds— A moment without the leeches. Without a giant worm trying to cave his skull in. But he didn't have that, and he needed another way to get these things off of him. His eyes flicked down to the dark shaft in his right hand. In that moment the fractal patterns grown into the wood looked awfully familiar. Was the rhizome just a tool to grow weapons? Or could it serve another purpose? Was he using this gift to its full potential?

Cade's eyes narrowed as he focused on the thin thread of green life essence running from his hand into the spear. He seized it with his will and tightened down on the connection. The rhizome inside of him stirred instantly and drew deeply from his resources. It reached for his health, his stamina, and his mana. And then it reached for the essence cycling through his channels. Cade felt that tug and rejected it instantly. It could take what it needed from his other resources but he needed his essence.

He needed it to keep the shell above him from fracturing further. He needed it to conjure the flames when he killed these disgusting creatures. The command formed in his mind and the rhizome obeyed at once. His rejection of essence caused a sharp drain to rip through him as the rhizome dug deeper into his reserves. But it didn't split the burden evenly. Cade felt a violent pull in his chest, followed by a wave of cold lightheadedness so sudden it nearly made him pass out on the spot. His vision swam.

It felt like giving blood after a two week fast. Like something vital was being siphoned straight out of him all at once. But the spear in his hand responded as the rhizome poured what it took from him into the weapon. The dark wood in his grip shuddered, then the fractal patterns etched along its surface began to glow. At first it was only a dull ember-red, faint lines kindling where his palm met the shaft.

The light bled outward from his hand in branching veins, splitting and re-splitting into a fractal canopy that crawled along the grain of the wood. Red deepened to molten orange as the patterns spread, bright and pulsing. Orange sharpened into yellow. Yellow bled into green, then finally into blue. The colors chased one another down the length of the spear in radiant, branching patterns, each hue layered atop the last in luminous, interlocking channels.

It now looked less like carved wood and more like he was holding a storm bound inside an exoskeleton of living grain. Static pressure built around his hand. It crawled up his arm in prickling waves, raising the hair along his skin. The air around the spear began to hum. Tiny arcs snapped between the glowing fractals with sharp, hungry crackles. Cade could feel the charge gathering, but something inside him knew it wasn't finished. He knew it still lacked something. A direction. A purpose.

The power was there but what it needed now was a command. Cade bared his teeth as the broodmare's weight pressed harder against the shell. Leeches writhed around his legs in slick knots of gnashing flesh, their bodies piling against him in desperate waves. If the spear needed purpose, then he had one. Fry the living shit out of all of them. Cade seized that thought and drove it into the growing storm in his hand. He had felt lightning before. He had endured the reforging of his body.

He had drowned in it as it split him open, burned through marrow and muscle, shattered him apart, and remade him into something new. He knew lightning could be transformative. He had lived through what it could create. But at its heart, lightning was violence. Sudden and absolute. The spear responded. Its hum sharpened into a shriek. The fractal lines flared brighter as Cade fed more of himself into the rhizome, shaping the charge with a single command. Destroy. The pressure surged in answer.

The colors raced along the spear and brightened to blinding intensity. Red to orange to yellow to green to blue before being wrapped in violet, each hue feeding the next until the entire weapon blazed like a prism holding a storm at its center. The charge inside it swelled toward a breaking point, harmony and violence folding into one another as the spear trembled in his hand. Then it reached a crescendo. Cade roared and drove upward. His legs strained against the ash. His left arm heaved.

He forced the shell up with everything he had left, shoving the broodmare's maw back just enough to break the crushing weight pressing him down. The shell cracked. He felt it through the tether—sharp fractures spiderwebbed across the surface as the broodmare's teeth ground against it. At this moment he didn't care. The pressure above him eased for half a heartbeat. Just enough for Cade to thrust.

The spear shot upward and buried itself deep into the broodmare's open maw, punching past rows of black teeth and sinking into the wet, pulsing flesh beyond. Then he gave the storm its final command. Release. The spear erupted. A blinding flash exploded from the weapon in a violent burst of multicolored lightning. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet detonated upward in branching arcs, a prismatic storm erupting straight into the broodmare's throat.

The bolt hit like divine judgment, lancing through its maw before splintering outward in jagged, radiant fractures. The broodmare convulsed. Light burst beneath its skin. For one impossible instant, Cade could see the entire outline of the massive worm illuminated from within—its segmented body reduced to a translucent silhouette of pulsing organs, dense plates, and branching veins of crackling color as the lightning tore through it from the inside out. Then the arcs spread.

They leapt from the broodmare's body into the swarm around Cade in snapping chains of violent light. Leeches burst apart in wet sprays of flesh and violet gore as the electricity tore through them, their bodies twitching and blackening as multicolored arcs danced from one to the next. The air filled with the sharp stink of ozone and burning meat as System notifications slammed against the edge of Cade's vision in a frantic cascade.