This was a gamble, pure and simple. On some level, all strategies were, but this one was especially borne of desperation.
The minions might’ve acted as one unit, but they were each clearly living beings—each possessing hearts and minds of their own. Which meant they could be hurt. If there was one truth Vir knew, it was that all animals felt pain. And pain was the enemy of rational thought.
Their interconnectedness that formed the backbone of their formidable strength would become their most damaging weakness.
Because it wasn’t only thoughts they shared, but sensations as well. Sensations such as pain and feelings of fear. Of terror.
The effects didn’t take long to manifest. Minions shirked back whenever Vir approached, their self-preservation instincts warring with the mandate of the hive mind.
Vir continued to pierce, slice, and cut. Now, instead of a field of corpses, Vir was surrounded by a ring of emptiness.
“Is that all you have?” Vir roared, brandishing his talwar and pointing at the beasts who formed a circle around him, staying a good twenty paces away.
“You can’t make more if I don’t kill any,” Vir said, his pose showing absolute, infallible confidence. “Can you?”
Wails of pain were Vir’s only reply. Which was fortuitous because his mental state was far from the confidence he projected. Running on his last wisps of prana, he felt weary, spent, and most importantly—exposed.
He stood in a den of beasts fully capable of tearing him limb from limb, and as he was, he barely even possessed the capacity to escape.
Now!
Vir disappeared into the shadows, praying to Badrak, God of Luck, that his own fortune would hold.
Emerged next to the hemisphere of the beast’s main body, Vir struck. Instead of rushing to form a layer of armor, the nearby beasts hesitated.
Some shirked back, while others moved timidly forward, their individual minds refusing the command to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
It lasted only an instant.
An instant was enough.
Vir’s palm met the inky black flesh of the hemisphere… and with every ounce of force he could muster, he began to drain.
Several things happened in quick succession.
Prana surged into Vir’s body at an absurd rate, rapidly refilling his blood and reestablishing Prana Armor.
The black hemisphere visibly shriveled around Vir’s palm, becoming leathery and gray as if aging at an accelerated rate.
Finally, the beasts around Vir began to rampage. Whatever compulsion that had been commanding their obedience disappeared all at once, and they laid into one another, slaughtering with reckless abandon.
Vir took the opportunity to fire a Blade Launch directly into the hemisphere before High Jumping to a safer position, breaking his drain of the hemisphere for the briefest instant.
If the monster noticed the cessation of his draining attack, it certainly didn’t show it. Not when it was writhing in pain from the Blade Launch.
Once on top, Vir smashed both palms against its slimy membrane and ruthlessly pulled. When his body could take no more, Vir began hurling Talwar Barrages at the beast, using the very prana he siphoned to inflict wound after wound.
Like a deflating hot-air balloon, the hemisphere collapsed in on itself—dead.
Precious few minions survived the mad slaughter, but their efforts earned them only the briefest extension of life. Like marionettes whose strings had been cut, each and every surviving minion collapsed lifeless to the ground.
Vir hardly had the time to notice. Standing atop the hemisphere as it deflated, he found himself suddenly falling.
He’d expected to land on the ground beneath the hemisphere, and as such, braced himself for impact. A fall from this height would hardly faze him—his Leaps and High Jumps often took him much higher.
Which was why his stomach fell out from under him when he didn’t stop. Nor did he even slow. In fact, he gained speed. Falling. Deeper and deeper into an abyss whose bottom was nowhere to be found.
53THE BURIED SECRETS OF PRAYA PARUL
The pit disappeared around Vir, darkness enveloping him as he fell.
Vir was no stranger to darkness. That wasn’t what bothered him. It was the torrent of prana assaulting him that consumed his attention.
This wasn’t Ashen Realm prana, or even Mahādi Outskirts prana. It was prana so thick, so dense, that Vir struggled under pressure he hadn’t felt in a very long time. As he fell, the prana pushed past the last vestiges of Prana Armor, worming its way into his body. Into his blood. Stretching and expanding it.
Vir might have taken a moment to appreciate the somewhat discomforting-yet-satisfying pain… were he not falling into an abyss.
The ground rushed up at a furious pace. Just moments ago, Vir would have worried—without prana, he was barely stronger than a normal demon.
After draining the Ash Beast and consuming the prana that stormed hungrily into his body, his worries had subsided.
Using Light Step, Vir touched softly onto the rocky ground. Looking up, the storm clouds were far in the distance—the ever-present lightning flashing brightly against the bleak backdrop.
The perfectly cylindrical tunnel had clearly been dug by hands—but by whose, Vir couldn’t say. Nor had Vir heard of any rumors of a powerful font of prana lying under the Chitran capital city.
Which either meant it was new, or it’d been triggered by something after the Chitrans left. At least it explained how the beasts there were so powerful.
Good thing I didn’t try to outlast its prana reserves… With this amount, he’d have died of old age before that beast—which Vir tentatively dubbed The Prana Gorger—succumbed.
Prana Vision was nearly worthless due to the overwhelming abundance of Ash prana, so Vir was forced to rely on his eyes and groping around to feel his way around the pitch-blackness.
While Leaping out was certainly an option, Vir was compelled to explore what lay at the source of this mystery. If nothing else, the environment made for ideal training conditions. It’d been so long since Vir had encountered a truly prana-dense environment, that he was beginning to fear his prana capacity would never expand again.
Even if only for a few hours, Vir wished to spend as much time soaking in the prana as possible. Perhaps, after he’d sent back the weapons and armor that were now ripe for the taking, he’d return here and spend a few days meditating.
Vir’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, allowing him to spot a darker patch of wall—slightly darker than the rest. It was there that the Ash prana density was greatest, so Vir made his way toward it.
What I’d give for a Magic Lamp orb right now…
If the hole he’d fallen through was dark, the tunnel that led to it was somehow even deeper than pitch-black. Not a single mote of light penetrated these depths, forcing Vir to place a hand on a wall to guide him. His only worry was that this wasn’t simply a tunnel, but rather an underground network of tunnels like the ones under Daha. If so, he could easily get lost in here.
His worries were put to rest when his fingers brushed up against a cold stone wall.
The end of the passage.
Had Vir only his nonexistent sight to rely on, he’d have turned back. Except, even compromised as it was, Prana Vision painted a very different picture. The surging torrent of prana that blinded him originated from here. Behind the wall.
Which made Vir think that maybe this wasn’t a wall at all, but a door. Vir sunk into the shadows, fully intending to emerge on the other side.