In his entire life, Diven had never run for so long. At this point, both his minds had lost track of time. Without the sun, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed.
Div and En were alternating between running and clashing with a section of the faceless horde. Nothing they did had any effect, except wearing themselves down.
[There’s so much mana in the Rot Heart, it was going to be an issue sooner or later.]
(We could have found a better solution.)
[How? You know as well as I do what position we are in right now!]
(Still… Three more skills. How can you not care?)
[It’s not that I don’t care. But Echoes of the Rot Heart is more useful than its non-attuned version. Same with our three newly transformed skills. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of it?]
(You don’t know that! It may be an upgrade for Rotten Spear, as repulsing as it is. But I’m not letting you say that for Rotten Shield and Rotten Spearfish. We don’t even know what changed yet.)
[You’re too biased. I don’t like rot either, but you know how powerful Uncle Basil’s Sun Heart is. We have the same thing for rot, it would be a waste not to use it.]
(Dream on. I’m never going to agree to this.)
Div internally sighed. En had inherited a part of Diven’s personality that was a lot less practical than the one he did. To him, there was no reasoning with the elders of the clan. They had been exiled just for awakening the Rot Heart bloodline, pretending it didn’t exist wouldn’t help in that regard.
In his opinion, they needed to embrace it. Show the elders the rot-attunement could be a boon for the clan. It might not work, but at least they would gain control over the mana inside them.
There was just so much of it.
It was worrying.
However, it wasn’t the time nor the place to have this discussion, so Div let it drop.
For now, the priority was dealing with the faceless pursuit. Or rather, the faceless herding them toward something.
Although their body had been strengthened by completing three facets since awakening, they couldn’t run forever.
They were exhausted.
They were hungry.
They were thirsty.
Yet they couldn’t stop. The horde didn’t let them.
(We can’t continue like that.)
[Agreed. But I don’t see an alternative.]
(We could fight. Make a stand.)
[We would die.]
(Yes, but we would die fighting.)
[It’s unlike you to say something like that. Get yourself together, En.]
(I’m just so done with this rift. I want it to end.)
[Not like that. We’ll find a way.]
But there was no way. They were surrounded on three sides by countless faceless creatures. There was no way to break through their lines. They were stuck.
They couldn’t even outrun them with The Fifth Direction. They had tried, but the armies flanking them seemed to extend forever into the distance.
All they could do was comply.
At least, as long as they kept moving and didn’t fight back, the horde was content to match their pace.
A pace that was only slowing down as they ran out of energy.
They were not even running anymore, merely walking.
What waited at the end of the road that made the monsters so insistent?
Div and En didn’t speak.
Their minds were blank, working on autopilot to put one foot in front of the other.
Step by step, they edged closer to their unknown destination.
Slowly. Inexorably.
By the time they arrived, they would be too tired to resist whatever the faceless wanted from them.
But they still had some agency. Noticing the faceless didn’t care about their speed, they slowed as much as possible. Div and En alternated giving control to the other so they could rest. It wouldn’t relieve the body, but having a well-rested mind was just as important.
Once they finished the climb of a particularly tall hill, they took the chance to observe the landscape around them.
There wasn’t much of note.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
All but directly in front of them, the view was covered in a sea of faceless. Little white dots covered the grassland, stretching all the way to the horizon. There was no breaking out of that.
The only place free of them was the narrow corridor they had been following since the chase started.
In this direction, there was a black stone reminding them of the guardians. Same as the other back at the start of the rift, the stone was rectangular and stood alone in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe they would see the guardians there. Div and En wondered how the three masked figures would react to the army of faceless. As usual, En was optimistic. Too optimistic according to Div.
They would arrive there in a few hours.
But what really caught their eyes was a tree. A fruit tree, to be precise. Even from a distance, they could spot small orange fruits growing on it.
Without thinking, they accelerated. Even using The Fifth Direction to reach the tree faster.
They needed those fruits.
They were so good.
So juicy.
A few minutes passed before they were at the base of the tree holding the object of their desire.
[Let’s get them all! All of them!]
(It doesn't matter if the horde attacks us. We’ll fight for those fruits.)
[Well said. For the orange fruits!]
They first grabbed all the ones that were within arm’s reach. Like on the previous tree, there wasn’t a lot. Then they climbed up the trunk and reached out toward the fruits on the upper branches.
Once they had seven fruits in total, their hands were full. They gulped two down and focused their attention on the last two fruits.
These were the hardest to get to. One of them was at the very top of the canopy, there was no branch solid enough to reach it. The other was at the tip of a very long, lonely branch which similarly lacked a good way to access it without breaking it.
(The faceless are approaching.)
[I know. I’m not leaving without those two fruits.]
(Let’s eat the others first.)
With how good the fruits tasted and how starving Div and En were, the five fruits in their hands didn’t last long. With no seed, soft skin, and plump flesh, they were very easy to eat, almost melting in their mouth.
Then, they turned toward the two remaining fruits. There was no way they were leaving without them.
Already reinvigorated—the fruits gave such a boost—they considered how best to catch them.
The one at the top was simpler. They would cut down the branch and catch the fruit as it fell. That was only until they remembered they had lost all their tools. With only the frostcrawler spearfish tusk, it would take ages. The thing was doing its job as a spear, but it wouldn’t help in cutting branches. It just wasn’t sharp enough.
There was only one solution: use their spear tip to reach it.
Div and En raised their spear high in the air. They stood on their toes and just managed to plunge the tip into the fruit. Slowly, they brought it down toward them.
But the fruit was already blackening.
(Rot…)
[We need to learn to control it.]
(It wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t touch the heart!)
[Not now, let’s get the other one. The faceless are almost upon us.]
With the spear option not viable anymore, they resorted to the only move they could think of. As carefully as they could, they crawled on the branch holding the fruit. It was too thin, it wouldn’t hold their weight. But that was fine. All they needed to do was to break it.
The rest of the branch would fall to the ground, including the fruit.
The plan was almost perfect — almost. The only thing they hadn’t accounted for was that they would fall with the branch. Still, their body was resilient, getting away with only a small bruise.
Well, it wasn’t that small, but they had known worse.
However, by the time they stood back up, the horde was already there. It might have been fine, except the faceless wave engulfed the fruit.
It was unacceptable.
They wouldn’t give up their precious, oh so precious, fruit.
Filled with greed, anger, and a distinct lack of reason, Div an En charged at the army. Using The Fifth Direction to weave through the ranks of the faceless, they swept their spear left and right, carving a path toward their goal.
Each hit was fatal, rot spreading across the victim in an instant. The bodies took mere seconds to turn into puddles of slop and scattered bones. But neither Div nor En minded. Their eyes were locked onto the orange delight.
It was so precious, so fragile. They needed to save it.
Their onslaught was interrupted when a faceless stepped on the fruit. It splashed into a mess of ruined pulp. Div and En saw red and planted their spear into the offender before their minds cleared.
(What are we doing?)
[That’s insane. Why are we in the middle of the army?]
(It's the fruit. We wanted to grab it.)
[This thing is dangerous. I wasn’t thinking at all. All I wanted was the fruit.]
(Let’s get out of here!)
Div and En were confused. Was the fruit magical in some manner? Did it have some power over them, pushing them to consume it? The ones on the first tree didn’t do that, not to that extent.
(Maybe it's because we’re tired?)
[Or we ate too much of it.]
(Possible.)
Now that they were free from the fruit’s influence, it didn’t take them long to escape the melee and put distance between them and the army.
At least, thanks to the richness of the fruits, they felt much better.
[You know, considering how powerful the effect of Rotting Spear is…]
(Don’t even bother finishing your sentence.)
[I mean, if we could make it spread from target to target…]
(No. That would be stupidly dangerous. What if we couldn’t control the spread? It could infect people.)
[Well, we’re in a rift so it would be contained.]
(No means no, Div.)
[It’s not like we can do it now. But imagine.]
(Shut up! What’s gotten into you? Since you’ve touched the Rot Heart, it’s like you’ve completely changed your mind on our attunement.)
[It’s strong.]
(We don’t need it.)
Because En was so opposed to anything rot-related, Div took the time to inspect their newly transformed skills.
Without testing, it was hard to say exactly how Shield and Spearfishing would be affected, but Div didn’t think it was a downgrade.
The main issue he noted was how it would make fishing with their spear impractical. If the fish was going to rot in contact with the weapon, there was no point in catching them.
Still, he was convinced the effect of the rot-attuned skills could be controlled through rot magic. He just needed to understand how rot worked.
Div really needed to convince his other half.
En, meanwhile, was racking his brain over how to revert the transformation. If a skill could be transformed to align with an attunement, it stood to reason it could be transformed back. All he needed was to find out how he could strip the rot off.
But if he could strip the rot from their skills, who was to say he couldn’t remove it from their bloodline too?
En really thought there was potential in this idea.
All he needed was to understand how to do it.