Kyren looked at her.
“You knew.” “I suspected.” “If this kills me—” “Then you were going to die anyway.” He hated her answer because it was true.
More vampires came.
Eventually Kyren stopped eating only corpses others had killed.
One lunged at him.
Kyren saw the movement before it began.
He stepped sideways, opened the creature’s throat with the knife and fed.
Another used a portal.
Kyren felt the distortion in space.
Turned before the vampire emerged.
Sword through the chest.
Another.
Another.
The battle began changing around him.
At first he had hidden from it.
Then he survived inside it.
Then things began avoiding him.
He ate Jorogumo next.
The first bite filled his head with somebody else’s memory.
A cage.
A man screaming.
A Jorogumo child born inside webbing.
A Weaving Mother touching a pale organ inside a dead body and seeing everything that person had ever known.
Kyren dropped the flesh.
“What the fuck—” Images kept coming.
Kumo Memory.
The Jorogumo’s ability was not simply memory-reading.
Their biological structure could preserve fragments of experience and transmit them.
Kyren swallowed again.
Webs became understandable.
Not as material.
As extensions of nervous intention.
He lifted two fingers.
A strand formed between them.
Another Jorogumo attacked.
Kyren sent the thread outward.
It wrapped around one leg.
Weak.
The spider tore free.
Kyren killed it and ate.
The second copy stacked.
The web strengthened.
Third.
Fourth.
By the tenth Jorogumo, Kyren could stretch invisible threads between trees without moving his hands.
Then came Living Web Fields.
Space around him changed.
Enemies entering the radius became fractionally slower, not because their bodies had weakened, but because web-magic interfered with the gap between perception and response.
One hundredth of a second.
Then more.
Each Jorogumo carrying the trait reinforced it.
A vampire charged and seemed to hesitate in mid-stride.
Kyren cut his head off.
Then Tsugimocho entered him.
That power frightened him.
A thread touched an enemy’s soul and offered influence over emotion and decision.
Kyren felt the urge to test it.
He attached one to a vampire.
Stop.
The vampire stopped.
His face filled with horror at what his own body had done.
Kyren killed him immediately.
“I hate that one.” The Kitsune heard.
“Then don’t use it.” “If I have it, I can use it.” “That’s not the same thing.” Kyren stared at the corpse.
Power did not frighten him because power was inherently corrupting.
Members of every race frightened him because they constantly invented reasons why their own desires justified using power against others.
He would remember that.
He ate the strongest Jorogumo he could kill.
Arachno-Demonic adaptation entered his flesh.
His body tried to expand.
Bones shifted.
Kyren forced it down before the transformation completed.
He understood the principle instead: adaptive mass, chitin generation, limb replication.
Not something he wanted to wear permanently.
Something available.
Then the Kitsune fought beside him.
Fire.
Teleportation.
She vanished between enemies and reappeared in sparks.
One Jorogumo caught her.
Kyren cut the web.
Another spider struck her hard enough to break ribs.
She fell.
Kyren reached her.
“Can you move?” “Eventually.” “That’s not useful.” “Eat the dead one.” “You’re obsessed.” “And you’re alive.” Kyren ate a dead Kitsune that had fallen earlier in battle.
Fire exploded through his lungs.
He coughed flame.
Aiko stared.
“Please warn me before you start doing that.” Kyren vanished.
For a fraction of a second there was no distance.
Then he stood ten paces away.
Teleportation.
The second Kitsune corpse strengthened it.
The third extended range.
The fourth reduced the pause between jumps.
Kyren learned to enter and leave flame faster than eyes could track.
Hundreds died around them.
He stopped counting how many he consumed.
Hundreds of vampires.
Hundreds of Jorogumo.
Stronger variants.
Creatures that had survived decades or centuries of conflict only to become components in something none of them understood.
Every repeated ability stacked.
Vampiric regeneration became rapid reconstruction.
Speed became motion too fast for ordinary vision.
Dark perception became awareness across smoke, night and magical obscurity.
Portal affinity merged with Kitsune teleportation until Kyren no longer needed the original portals; he could feel folds in space and choose where to emerge.
Multiple Jorogumo web-fields layered until opponents entering his radius felt as if thought itself had become viscous.
Kumo Memory expanded until touching consumed tissue could reveal memories more clearly.
Tsugimocho grew stronger, though Kyren rarely used it.
Fire from Kitsune ceased behaving like ordinary flame and began burning magic as readily as flesh.
His appearance changed with the accumulation.
The black hair remained, blue at its ends, but strands of gold appeared between them when certain powers surfaced.
His body lengthened.
Not into adulthood, but toward something unnaturally perfected for its age: muscles packed beneath skin without bulk, pupils changing forms depending on what sense dominated, fingertips occasionally hardening into dark claw-like material before returning to normal.
Blue fluid continued to run through him.
When he was wounded, it spilled bright against ash.
Eventually Kyren stopped feeling where his own abilities ended and Delasai began.
He put one hand against the ground.
The forest answered with a violence that shook the battlefield.
Trees moved.
Not branches.
Trees.
Ancient trunks tore roots from the soil.
Wood folded into joints.
Branches curled into enormous hands.
Faces emerged from bark as if they had always existed beneath it.
Giants of Delasai rose among the battle.
One seized a Jorogumo and crushed the spider body against its trunk.
Another swatted three vampires from the air.
Aiko stared upward.
“Kyren…” He was not commanding them.
He knew that instantly.
They had chosen to stand.
Then voices entered his mind.
Deep.
Slow.
Thousands overlapping.
Absorb us.
Kyren pulled his hand away.
The voices continued.
Absorb us.
“No.” ABSORB US.
Another tree.
Another.
Ancient consciousness passed through the soil.
“Why?” Images answered.
Fire.
Roots drying.
Generations of elves born, dying, returning to soil.
Delasai had accumulated magic for thousands upon thousands of years.
It understood something Kyren did not.
Its stored power could remain in dying trunks or pass into something capable of carrying it beyond the forest.
Absorb us.
Blue fluid ran from Kyren’s nose.
“Kyren, stop,” Aiko said.
“I haven’t started.” The first tree pressed its roots around his hand.
Power entered him.
Kyren screamed.
Thousands of years compressed into seconds.
Rain from centuries before his birth.
Drought.
War.
Elven children playing beneath branches.
Corpses buried between roots.
Magic stored ring by ring inside wood.
His nose bled harder.
Blue liquid ran over his lips.
The tree dimmed.
Its consciousness entered him.
Then another touched him.
Again.
“I can’t.” YOU MUST.
Kyren pressed both hands into the earth.
One tree after another surrendered power.
His hearing expanded across Delasai.
He felt fires burning kilometres away.
Roots breaking.
Elves dying.
He heard the last impulses of trees being consumed by flame.
Blue blood ran from his ears.
“Enough!” Aiko grabbed his shoulder.
Kyren looked at her and for a moment saw not her face but the heat inside her body, the electrical impulses in her nerves, the magic braided through her blood.
“I have to keep going.” “You’re bleeding everywhere.” “I always bleed everywhere.” “That’s not funny.” “I wasn’t joking.” The Kitsune placed one paw against the ground.
Aiko looked at her, then did the same.
Delasai responded to them too, though far less violently.
Power climbed Aiko’s arm.
She cried out.
Her magical channels widened.
The Kitsune’s fire brightened until the tips of her fur glowed orange-white.
They could take only a fraction.
Kyren took the rest.
Tree after tree.
Thousands of years.
The battlefield became distant.
His consciousness expanded beyond his body.
And then reality opened.