The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 28: Chapter 28

Read chapter 28 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"Nature is a machine of infinite gears. He who understands the smallest cog may halt the largest clock." The dust in the hollow hadn't even begun to settle. Pendra’s broken form lay twisted in the dirt among the shattered clay and demolished wood of my workbench, her carapace covered in spidering cracks all over her body. Black blood pooled beneath her, hissing faintly as it ate into the packed earth. Pendra wasn't moving, and I couldn’t feel anything as I tried to send her mental images. The frantic noise of fight for survival had been completely silenced, replaced by a terrible, heavy stillness. I stood ten feet away, the heavy stone mortar still gripped tightly in my right hand. Not typically chosen for life or death battles by any. Chosen even less to fight whatever nightmare realm this midnight horror had crawled out from. Regardless, I needed to think of something quick because I was not built to deal with something like this, or anything really. In the gap where the root barricade had been violently pulverized, what I was going to call a Void-Stalker waited. It made no sound, and the fact it had no face, no eyes, and no mouth made it infinitely worse than anything I had faced yet. It was an undulating mass of slate-grey flesh, completely devoid of the protective chitin that defined what I had assumed to be the forest's apex predators, but I seem to either be wrong, or this wasn’t native to this area. Its body was a dense, rippling knot of pure muscle that shifted like thick oil, adding another layer to unsettle me. Worst were the clusters of whip-thin, translucent filaments, each ending in a barbed hook that pulsed with an otherworldly green light. The monstrosity completely ignored Pendra. Instead, I seemed to be the only thing on the menu at this current moment. My partner had been broken, and even if I looked weak, I still was at the first step of the second stage. With one threat neutralized, and only me left, the Stalker’s sensory filaments were entirely zeroed onto me. My mind, usually a cold and steady engine, struggled against the sheer, suffocating pressure radiating from the creature. If that was the only thing, I would be fine, but the flashes of images in my head, and the biting pain from my tetrahedrons had gone silent. I felt lost like never before in my life, mixed with the sheer terror of the monster before me, and the clear and unwavering knowledge that I had less than ten percent chance of coming out of this encounter alive. All of it was eating me alive at millisecond intervals. Biting my lip almost hard enough to draw blood snapped my mind back into focus, I squashed the useless thoughts down, and focused on the thing that bothered me the most to ground me. The silence. I forced my focus on what my mind was most comfortable with. The details. My eyes darted around observing the ambient energy of the forest. It wasn't just resting around it; it was actively being swallowed. I looked past the grey horror to the edges of the breach. The visual cues were impossible to ignore. The hanging vines and the thick, parasitic moss clinging to the hollow walls weren't swaying in the breeze. They were pulled unnaturally straight, stretched taut toward the Stalker’s core like iron filings aligning to a massive, invisible magnet. The creature didn't operate on Qi output, but on how much it could draw in to increase its density. Its body was moving on to the first stage of gravitational absorption. This was what it must have been like for Vane-Uru at the third stage, the beginning of a walking, biological sinkhole. I needed a measurement. I opened my hand and let the heavy stone mortar drop. It didn't fall at a standard nine-point-eight meters per second squared. The moment it left my palm, the stone accelerated unnaturally fast, ripping through the air and slamming into the dirt with a heavy, muted thud. The gravitational vector was violently skewed toward the creature's center mass. There was so much I still didn’t