Chapter 183: You Fight The Voices

Elias pushed forward; three more were coming from behind him, and he decided to run faster, allowing his Agility to eat the distance while using the maze to break their line of sight.

They were fast, but they were also creatures of habit, hunting with instincts and not intelligence, as they always attacked from the left and then head-on after the third echo. He had noticed that in the first engagement.

His breathing, his footsteps, everything created echoes in this passage, and like beings of instincts, they attacked on the third echo, and Elias cleanly killed any of them who reached him.

It was a rather fascinating hunting tactic, and Elias wondered how these creatures had evolved to hunt in this manner.

He used it now, baiting them into positions where the crystals worked against them, and where their own pack tactics created confusion. By the time he reached a chamber at the heart of the maze, he had killed seven.

Vitality: 4517 / 4517

Stamina: 945 / 973

Finally, he reached his target. This was the reason he had been running; he could sense the chamber all the way from the beginning of the passage, and every echo seemed to converge in this chamber, and he knew that this must be one of the targets that the Commander wanted him to hunt.

The chamber was circular, perhaps fifty feet across, its walls covered in crystals so dense they formed a single glittering surface, and in the center, on a pedestal of natural rock, sat a palm-sized crystal that hummed with trapped sound.

A voice whispered past his ears, and Elias turned around, but he saw no one. What the voice said was, “The Echo Stone.”

Elias approached slowly, listening to the sound coming from the crystal that should be the Echo Stone. He heard no other sound; the chamber was silent except for that hum.

There were no creatures here and no obvious threat, but his instincts were screaming that something was wrong. In any other situation, he would retreat and think about what he needed to do, but Elias knew that this was part of the test.

It was strange that Elias lost his grip on his helmet, even though he had fallen from a height into a lake filled with Ice Poison; there was no reason he would have allowed his grip to slip from one of the most important tools that could complete his defenses.

Even without confirming it, Elias suspected that the Commander saw everything that happened in the Asylum, maybe even outside of it. He did not know the limit of her senses; maybe with the Heavenly Restrictions covering the city, she may not be able to see outside the walls of the Asylum, but everything going on within must be under her sight.

She must have seen him activate the Art of Stone and must understand how much defense he could gain from this. He also knew that he had revealed too many of his secrets while he was inside the safety of his home, and there were a few things she did not know about him.

It was an unpleasant thought to be known this deeply by a higher power, but Elias saw this as a cost of his training. How else could the Commander know which of his weaknesses to push in order to make him stronger if she did not know more about him?

From this mysterious passage that hundred sight and sound, to this strange Crystal… he was being told that he would never have the time to properly prepare, or would his tools always be ready at hand.

Elias was a meticulous hunter who believed in preparation, but the Commander seemed intent on breaking him of this habit. All the tests and trials he had been thrown into were the ones he had not prepared for or understood, as he was being made to think on his feet.

Nothing that he would find in this place was a mistake, and it was all designed to push him past the limit. If he failed, then he was not worthy of his powers.

Elias walked up to the crystal, and nothing happened. “Here goes nothing,” he whispered and touched the crystal.

…. And nothing happened, Elias cocked his head to the side and grabbed the crystal, and the world exploded into sound.

There were voices, thousands of them, and they were screaming, weeping, begging, cursing.

They filled his head, drowning out thought, drowning out sense, drowning out everything except the raw noise of the dead.

It was as if the Passenger was screaming in his head, but this curse had been dialed up a thousand times.

Elias fell to his knees, hands pressed to his ears, but the voices were not outside him; they were inside, pouring from the Echo Stone through his armor and skin into his mind, from the connection he had made by touching it.

“Kill us.”

“Help us.”

“Why did you let us die?”

“Monster.”

“Savior.”

“Brother.”

“Father.”

“Please.”

Elias screamed, but no sound came out; the voices were louder than anything his throat could produce, and beneath them all, he heard another voice that was familiar; however, unlike before, the voice now seemed calmer and patient. It was the Passenger, and Elias hated how his mind pursued that calm voice as a wave to tether his mind during the storm.

“You hear them too, don’t you? The dead and the forgotten. The ones who should have lived… the ones that you failed to save.”

Elias fought to think through the noise. The Passenger was using this, feeding on the chaos, growing stronger in the confusion. If he did not regain control, he would lose himself entirely. If the voice of the Passenger begins to make sense in his head, then he is lost.

“I am your salvation, do you not realize this by now?”

Through the pain, Elias grinned, and he pulled his mind away from reaching towards the Passenger. A small part of him was aware that he could still control his body, and he could let go of the Echo Stone, but Elias understood that the moment he did this, he would have failed the test.

There was a reason he was given this test by the Commander, and he would be a fool not to understand that he had something talking to him inside his head, and this Echo Stone was an opportunity to manage this curse.

Elias breathed out; his breath was red, as if his blood had turned to mist, but this was just the result of his legacies working in overdrive. Through the madness, Elias reached for his Will, calling upon the Trait of his Unbreakable Sovereign Will, a power that had held him together through death itself.

If he were told how he achieved what he did next, Elias would not be able to properly explain, but he seized the noise and pushed. The thousands of voices screamed as Elias’s Will seized them and compressed them. They fought back, but his Will was Sovereign and all of them could not equal him.

Slowly, his Will kept pressing down on the voice, and finally, there was silence.

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