Monarch of the Calamity Beast

Chapter 3: The Echo Desert and the First Hunger

Ash coated the back of Kaelen's throat. He swallowed dry, trying to clear the taste of burnt thatch and scorched copper, but it clung to his tongue. He dragged his heavy boots through the stony dirt, each step pulling him further from the smoldering remains of Eldermire.

He didn't look back. There was no point.

The village was gone, reduced to embers and charred wood, along with the High Priest of the Solar Aegis Order. Kaelen pulled his collar up against the biting wind. His jaw ached from clenching it. Whenever he blinked, the faces of the villagers flashed behind his eyelids. Not their faces before the fire, but after.

He remembered the miller's daughter. She used to leave crushed dandelions on his stoop. When the Aegis knights had cornered her, Kaelen had stepped into the holy fire, taking the searing, blinding light across his own back to shield her. But when the light faded and the knights lay broken in the dirt, she hadn't thanked him. She had scrambled backward, kicking up dust, her wide eyes locked on the black, inky blood dripping from Kaelen's forearms.

She looked at him like he was the disease.

"They look upon you as if you were a plague," Malakor said. The voice didn't come from the wind. It was a low, grating vibration at the base of Kaelen's skull, like stones grinding together underground. "Humanity is rot. You severed the dead limb. Leave it behind."

Kaelen rubbed his temple. His fingers came away smeared with soot. "Be quiet," he muttered.

"You crave their approval. It is a weakness."

"I said be quiet." Kaelen stopped walking. He stared out at the barren stretch of the Wasteland of Echoes. The sky above was an infected violet, pulsing weakly with ambient Aether radiation. The air felt heavy, saturated with microscopic glass that irritated his eyes.

He breathed out slowly, pushing away the memory of the girl, and pulled up his system interface.

It wasn't a projection. It was a bruising, purple ache that bled directly into his optic nerve, forcing the text to hover in his field of vision. Stage One Void Assimilator. Level four. He glossed over his absolute affinity for the Void. It was a mockery of the holy light he had once been forced to revere.

He had five unallocated points from the slaughter in the square. His current attributes sat heavily in his mind. Strength twenty-eight, Agility thirty-two, Endurance twenty-five, Perception twenty.

His body already felt alien. The essence he had ripped from the High Priest sat in his gut like a swallowed stone. He could feel his veins pulsing sluggishly, thickened by the Void Aether pumping through him.

He willed three points into Agility and two into Strength.

The reaction wasn't just painful. It was violent. Kaelen dropped to his hands and knees, gagging. A shock of glacial cold spiked up his spine, driving needles of ice into his vertebrae. He bit down on his lip so hard he tasted iron. His muscles seized, spasming as microscopic fibers tore and knitted back together, denser, tighter.

He spat a mouthful of acidic bile into the gray dust. He stayed on all fours for a long minute, just listening to his own ragged breathing. His joints popped audibly as he slowly pushed himself up.

He opened his hands. Closed them. The compressive force of his grip made the tendons in his forearms ache with new tension.

A new line of text forced its way into his vision. Shadow Step. The knowledge of the skill unpacked in his brain like a sudden, jarring memory. Merging into darkness to traverse space. Ten meters. It would burn his physical stamina and drain his Void Aether, but he understood the mechanics instantly.

Kaelen wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve and kept walking.

The Echo Desert opened up before him. There was no sand, just deep drifts of gray volcanic ash and massive, skeletal remains jutting out of the earth. Ribcages the size of cathedrals curved toward the toxic sky, the decaying monuments of creatures from a forgotten age. Far off, purple lightning flashed silently through low clouds.

The wind whistling through the hollow ground created a faint, overlapping wail. It sounded like people whispering in a crowded room. Kaelen ignored it, focusing on the rhythm of his own footsteps.

A mile into the ash drifts, his breath hitched.

Something was wrong with the air. The dry smell of dust was abruptly cut by the sharp, nauseating odor of sulfur and old meat. A strange heat prickled the back of his neck. He stopped. His right hand drifted toward his hip, fingers brushing the hilt of a rusted dagger he had taken from a dead Aegis knight.

He stood between two towering, jagged cliffs of black glass. The shadows here were thick. They seemed to pool around his boots, clinging to the dark fabric of his trousers.

Pebbles clattered down the left cliff face. Then came the sound of claws scraping hard stone.

Kaelen looked up.

Three Scythe-tail Prowlers were crawling headfirst down the vertical drop. They moved with a jerky, unnatural speed, their ash-gray carapaces clicking against the rock. They were the size of wolves, but their segmented bodies exposed wet, skinless red muscle underneath the armor. They had no eyes. Just a circular, rotating maw of translucent teeth. Long tails whipped behind them, ending in heavy bone scythes.

"Scavengers," Malakor hummed in his mind, the entity's amusement making Kaelen's teeth ache.

Kaelen drew the dagger. The metal was pitted and brittle. He knew it wouldn't do much.

One of the Prowlers shrieked, a sound like scraping a rusted pipe, and pushed off the cliff face. It hurled through the air, jaws spinning, aiming straight for Kaelen's chest.

Kaelen watched it come. The stench of its rotting breath hit him a second before the creature did.

He triggered Shadow Step.

The world lost its color, snapping into a bleak, freezing gray. Kaelen felt his stomach drop out as his physical body lost cohesion. It was like falling into freezing water in the dead of night. A fraction of a second later, the world slammed back into reality. He stumbled slightly, his boots digging into the ash three meters to the right.

The Prowler snapped its jaws on empty air and crashed into the dirt where Kaelen had just been.

Before the beast could orient itself, Kaelen moved. His new agility pushed him forward faster than his brain was used to processing. He channeled his Void Aether down his arm, letting absolute blackness coat the rusted steel of the dagger. The blade vibrated in his grip.

He drove the weapon into the side of the Prowler's neck.

The brittle metal should have shattered against the carapace. Instead, the Void aura ate through the armor like acid through paper. The blade sank deep into the wet, red muscle. Kaelen twisted his wrist and wrenched his arm back, tearing the creature's throat open.

Thick, neon-blue blood sprayed across Kaelen's boots. It hit the ground with a violent hiss, burning small craters into the ash.

The Prowler collapsed, its scythe-tail thrashing against the dirt for a few seconds before going still.

Kaelen let go of the dagger. The corrosive blood had already eaten through the Void shroud, melting the hilt into a useless, bubbling lump. He shook a few drops of burning blue liquid off his knuckles.

The other two beasts hit the ground running. They didn't hesitate. They split apart, coming at him from opposite sides. The left one whipped its tail low, aiming to take off Kaelen's legs. The right one lunged high for his throat.

Kaelen dropped his center of gravity. He threw his left arm down, catching the incoming bone-scythe with an open palm. The impact was like catching a swinging hammer. Pain shot up to his shoulder, but his reinforced bones held. He wrapped his fingers around the scythe, his grip locking like a vice.

Using the beast's own momentum, Kaelen pivoted his hips and ripped the Prowler off the ground. He swung its heavy body through the air like a club, slamming it directly into the trajectory of the second leaping beast.

They collided with a heavy, wet crunch. The second Prowler's spinning jaws panicked and clamped down on the first one's exposed shoulder muscle, tearing out a massive chunk. Both beasts hit the ground in a tangled, shrieking heap of limbs and spraying acid blood.

A hollow, pulling sensation bloomed in the center of Kaelen's chest. It wasn't adrenaline. It was a deep, physical thirst.

He stepped forward. Black, cold flames ignited around his hands, absorbing the violet light from the sky. He waded into the thrashing knot of monsters.

He grabbed the skull of the top Prowler. His fingers dug into the hard carapace, finding the weak points in the segmented armor. He pressed his thumbs in deep and pulled forcefully. Bone cracked loudly in the quiet desert. More blue blood coated his forearms, smoking against his skin, but the Void within him automatically neutralized the acid before it could burn his flesh.

He felt nothing but the hollow ache in his chest.

The final Prowler was bleeding heavily from its side, trying to scramble backward away from him. Its eyeless head darted side to side. It was realizing it had made a mistake.

Kaelen followed it. His shadow stretched long over the gray ash. He crouched beside the trembling beast, his face completely blank. He reached forward and drove his hand straight into the center of the creature's chest. The black flames on his fingers melted away the bone and muscle. He rooted around inside the hot, wet cavity until his fingers brushed something hard and vibrating.

He ripped it out.

It was an Aether Core, the size of a large plum, pulsing with frantic energy. The Prowler went immediately limp.

Kaelen stood up slowly. He stared at the glowing core in his blood-soaked hand. The thirst in his chest was screaming now. He brought the core to his mouth and parted his lips. Dark mist spilled from his throat, wrapping around the crystal.

The gem crumbled into fine, glowing dust. Kaelen breathed it in.

A wave of euphoric, burning heat rushed down his windpipe, settling heavily in his stomach before branching out into his veins. It pushed away the cold. It pushed away the memory of the terrified little girl in Eldermire. For a brief, intoxicating second, there was no guilt. There was only power.

A soft chime registered in his mind. Four hundred and fifty experience points from the low-grade cores.

"Not enough," Kaelen said softly. He stared at his hand. The pores of his skin were actively absorbing the residual monster blood, cleaning the mess away.

"They were just scavengers," Malakor noted, his tone dismissive. "Look north. Past the desert."

Kaelen lifted his chin. In the far distance, towering over the toxic clouds, the Obsidian Mountains cut into the sky. Even from here, he could feel a faint, heavy pressure radiating from those peaks. The true monsters lived there. The ones the Aegis Order feared.

If he was going to tear down the Theocracy that had burned his home, he needed more than the scraps of scavengers. He needed oceans of Aether.

Kaelen wiped a smudge of dirt from his cheek. He stepped over the melting carcasses, his boots crunching rhythmically in the ash, and set his sights on the black peaks. The long walk had just begun.