Chapter 200: You Touch The Old Shadows

Rhys had said that he had not seen Elias’s limit, and while that was true, it did not mean that Elias should be able to move after the blow that he had just given him.

Many stronger, tougher Siphons and Beasts at the Mist Phantom level had fallen to half the strength he had placed in that blow that uniquely targeted the vitality of his targets.

With his experience and ability, Rhys had been continuously adding power to the blow to bring the boy to his knees at once because he knew how stubborn Elias could be.

However, for the first time since he acquired this ability, Rhys began to doubt its efficacy.

To put Elias down, he kept charging up the power needed for his strike, and Rhys could not hold back his shock when he realised that he must have knocked out close to three thousand points of vitality from the boy… that was fucking ridiculous!

He was barely shaking away the angered words from Lyssa when the mad lad charged at him, appearing like a Demon of Slaughter from the depths of the Maw.

Rhys’s eyes widened, a flicker of surprise that was there and gone. He raised his hand to summon the shadows, but Elias was already inside his reach, already too close for Shadow Walking, moving faster than any Fury Forge he had ever seen.

His blade swept toward Rhys’s throat, and they stopped an inch from his skin.

Lyssa’s threads held him. They were everywhere, wrapped around his arms, his shoulders, his chest, his legs.

He had not seen her weave them or felt them settle around him, and he knew that what held him in place was just her grace because this net could easily cut through his flesh and bones like it was paper.

“You’ve gotten faster,” Lyssa said. She was standing behind him, her hands raised, her fingers moving in patterns he must have seen a thousand times but never understood. “But you’re still predictable. You always go for the throat.”

Elias strained against the threads. They held. “You all taught me that. Always finish the fight in the most efficient way possible.”

“And you learned well,” Rhys said. He stepped back, out of range of Elias’s blade. “But finishing a fight isn’t the same as winning one.”

He raised his hand, and shadows rose with it, so plentiful that Elias felt space groaning under its weight.

Elias looked at Rhys with shock before the darkness fell on him like a wave.

He could not dodge as he was held in place by threads, and in the moments before the shadows touched him, he understood that Rhys had been holding back before.

This was not the shadow that he had always seen him wield, no, this was something else, as he could feel the hunger of the shadow even before they touched his skin.

Elias had always wondered about the history of his teachers. He knew they were soldiers, but what sort of battles they had fought or where they came from was unknown… but this falling shadow had shown Elias a glimpse of the horror that was hidden behind the levity of his teacher’s laughter.

The entire world as he knew it went dark. The shadows consumed the light around Elias, the heat, the air itself.

He could not breathe, could not see or hear anything but the slow, steady rhythm of his own heart, and in this silence, the whispers, the Passenger, everything fell silent, and Elias could hear beneath his heart beat, another rhythm, older, deeper, the pulse of the darkness that had been waiting for him since he entered this place.

Elias stopped struggling, and the threads did not release him even as the shadows consumed him and he had nothing left.

His body was broken, his stamina gone, his mind frayed from the weight of the dead he carried. He should not have made it this far. He should have died in the forest, in the lake, in the chamber of mirrors. He should have died a hundred times today.

But he was still here.

He was still fighting.

His blade vanished, and the threads loosened, just a fraction, as Lyssa adjusted her grip, but in that fraction of a second, Elias moved.

He did not go for Rhys or Lyssa; in this darkness, he could not find them. He dropped, fell to his knees, but he kept falling.

Elias fell into the shadow that Rhys had summoned, and the shadows… They welcomed him.

They were the shadows of the cavern, the shadows of the deep earth, the shadows that had been here since before the Asylum was built, before Stormfall was founded, before the gods fell and the world was remade.

They were not Rhys’s to command. They were Rhys’s to borrow. And for a moment, just a moment, they let Elias borrow them too.

He emerged behind Lyssa, his hand closed around her wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the threads.

Elias squeezed a bit, and that was enough to send a message, and the threads went slack.

“I could have hurt you,” he said.

Lyssa did not move. Her fingers were still, her breath steady.

“You could have… Why didn’t you?”

He released her and stepped back, while around them, the shadows receded, and Rhys was there, his face pale, his eyes wide.

“That was… blood of the gods, what did… how did… what the fuck did you do, Elias? Do you know how…” Rhys yelled.

“Stupid,” Elias finished. “I know.”

Elias looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He wondered if he had ever felt true fear until the moment that had just passed.

While the shadows had not hurt him, not physically, they had touched something inside him, something that had been sleeping since he was a child, something that remembered the darkness before he was born, before he had a name, before he was anything at all.

“You could have died,” Lyssa said. Her voice was soft, almost wondering. “If the shadows had decided to keep you…”

“Then I would have died.” Elias met her eyes. “But I didn’t. I’m still here.”

Elias could see the confusion in his teachers’ eyes, but he knew he could not tell them the truth about what had just happened and had to pretend that what he had just done was a mystery, when he knew it was anything but that.

In the Fragment, his Ascendant Swarm had unleashed a storm of ice and wind, eliminating thousands of statues that would have grounded Elias to a paste when he was barely more powerful than a mortal.

That power had emerged from the Ascendant Swarm, and up till this moment, he could not understand where that storm had come from or how he was not able to access it from that day.

This was until Rhys had poured down a deluge of shadows on him, and if it was anywhere else, then Elias would not have been able to move through the shadows… but the shadows in this place were old, and this sort of ancient power could be absorbed by his Ascendant Swarm.

Like the previous storm he had unleashed, all of these old shadows had been expended, and he would not be able to repeat what he had just done without Rhys summoning these shadows again, and Elias knew that such an act would be toying with death.

Whatever experience Rhys had experienced in the past had given him the ability to touch deeper levels of shadows, but he had only briefly done this to make a statement; he could not control these shadows and so could not understand what Elias had done.

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