Chapter 31: The Ancient Words

One moment, the red and yellow flames raged, and the statues’ cries were deafening; the next, all the flames vanished, and the broken statues fell silent, as if in shock at the sudden end of their torment.

A shocking cold suddenly erupted that began from the tunnel that Elias had run through and spread into the cavern, causing ice to cover the floor and what looked like snow to arise from empty air, as a loud shriek, unearthly and utterly cold and devoid of mercy, erupted from seemingly everywhere.

Elias’s green eyes flashed, and he smiled; the tables had turned. He stood up and began to recite the ancient words he had learnt from the stone blade. However, what he spoke was different from the chanting he made when he was drawing this poison into his flesh. The blade had two sides; one side was to accept, the other was to expel.

“Flesh of mine, no longer home…”

Elias had a great advantage when he was a mortal, and that was his ability to heal and regenerate nearly all wounds, but as a hunter, he had to find a method to use this unique ability to work for him.

He could not just go toe to toe with a Siphon, well, he could, but the result would be unpredictable and messy, and the likelihood that he would be discovered was always a factor.

“Cast wide the shell where shadows roam…”

He would like to believe that his next actions were solely taken by the virtues of his intelligence alone, but Elias knew that he did this almost by instinct, almost as if he was always meant to be a vessel for something.

He found a poison that could kill him, but not so quickly that his healing could not override the damage it was causing him, and this poison would have to be strong enough to hurt Siphons. What he had found turned out to be more special than he could have ever anticipated.

“Blood to flame and bone to ash…”

Elias now fully lived with the Order of the Unbroken Shield at the Stoneward Asylum, but there was a time when he ran away from those walls, fearing his talent and his curse that he knew would lead him to perish not too long in the future. He had not been a very good hunter then, and he was dying from the endless need of his body to kill.

Decaying and nearly mad with pain. Elias had been on the verge of death and was thrown out of the city due to his state, which was more dead than alive, and he found himself walking into the desert, where he came across a small oasis, and near its bank was the hilt of a stone blade.

“Release this form, and wake in fury…”

Pulling out the stone blade, Elias had seen tiny green specks surrounding it like mold, and he scraped it off only to find writings on it, and these words, although unfamiliar and alien, could still be read by him.

Without any fear in his heart since he would be dying anyway, Elias had read those words, and he had awakened something that he had barely understood. Those green specks were tiny green swarms, and their nature at the beginning was unknown.

In the beginning, they were so tiny, he could hardly see them with the naked eye, and as they entered his body for the first time, they did not take power from him, instead they gave it. His body healed, and his decay stopped, but his hunger increased. It did not take long for Elias to find out their other abilities, and the dimension of his hunt changed.

“Unbound by will, now fierce and free…”

He had been learning about the swarm he had placed inside his body, but as a mortal, there were few things he could do to truly investigate their nature, except to observe and use what worked.

He had discovered that the words on the stone blade could call them into his body, where they would go dormant, and when needed, he could use the other chanting to awaken them. He also discovered their relation with fire, and knew that they truly hated flames, and so Elias had been using this knowledge to control and direct them.

Keeping them in his body was not all advantageous, as Elias had noticed that as he killed with the green swarm, they were slowly growing bigger, and they were draining his health more rapidly, but thankfully, at their rate of growth, it would take a long time for them to overwhelm him. Still, his Status screen had shown him the cost of having them inside his body.

Vitality: 147 / 147 (Constant Refresh) [Vessel of Hunger – 50% Regeneration]

The Green Swarm… the Vessel of Hunger, reduced his regeneration by a flat fifty percent. His wounds took longer to heal, but for what they gave him in return, Elias would have still chosen to be the host for them even if it meant his regeneration was reduced by ninety percent.

“As I speak, so must it be….”

The Green Swarm now lived in his blood, and they slept until they were called. So his hunt usually roughly took this series of steps. He identified his target, studied them until he knew all the patterns of their lives and confirmed their guilt, and then he began poisoning them by finding a way for them to ingest his blood.

Depending on how strong they were, Elias could need a few dozen drops, or in the case of Josef, two pints. It was why it took nearly six months for Elias to finally kill Josef, who was a Fury Forge, and that was because he had to slowly feed the man his blood through the wine he gave him over these six months.

When Elias was ready for the hunt to begin, these chants he was making were the final words heard by his prey.

“Leave your borrowed dwelling and rise to feed on me!”

Deep in the tunnel where thousands of bleeding statues were frozen in place due to the unexpected cold that reduced the temperature of this place to a chilling degree, Elias’s left arm, left behind in the chaos, crumbled to dust, and green flashes of light in their hundreds emerged.

Throughout the tunnel as he escaped, Elias had been bleeding, although not much; it was still a lot of blood, and these blood stains were turning to ash and transforming into green specks of light.

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