Shadowborn exile a litrp.., p.22
Shadowborn Exile: A LitRPG Progression Fantasy, page 22
“You aren’t the only one.” Attica rose, his cloak whispering against the stone as he moved. He flexed his fingers, feeling a storm of power gather in his shade. He looked down at the seething mass of flashwraiths, their light guttering and shifting like dying stars.
“You’re going to kill them all, aren’t you?” Luther asked, mist swelling around him in excitement.
“That’s the plan.” Attica stepped forward, eyes fixed on the hive below. He moved to the edge, gathered shadow, and leapt into the fray.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Attica dropped into the hive.
The swarm didn’t see him coming as mist peeled from his cloak and shadows converged around him, unnatural and sharp, forming shapes of teeth and fury. The tendrils struck with him as he landed, the first emitters just crumpling under the weight of a dozen knives from every direction.
The next fired blindly, light blooming across the hive in a short, searing flash. Attica cut this one in half and was gone before the next could react.
He phased through a portion of the hive wall, aimed at the nest of avian emitters. He exploded into the flock of terrorbirds just as they were starting to take flight, his shade swelling with violence.
Attica ripped through several avians, grabbing one just as its wings lifted it off the ground, slammed it down, and crushed its head with his boot. He cut the wing off another, batted a third to the side with his sword and phased through a fourth, his body reforming solid as he crossed through to the other side, exploding the flashwraith’s upper torso.
Power rushed into Attica with each flashwraith he killed. Carnage became his fuel, Attica on a mission unlike any he could remember ever embarking upon.
Kill them all. For what they have done to my fellow Vanguard, for Dayanne and Eli—kill them all.
Two more emitters went down, bodies cut in half. Another sprang toward him, talons at the ready, only for Attica to push his blade through its neck and out of the back of its skull. He wasn’t here to test his strength, he was here to unleash, to bring forth the kind of pure, unadulterated hell that the flashwraiths had brought upon his life when they raided the settlement.
He shrieked with anger as he cut an emitter’s head off, just as its beam of light went wide and hit a portion of the hive, causing it to light on fire. His shade used the head as a projectile as it launched it directly into the face of another emitter, skull meeting skull with a dull thud.
Attica’s rage moved through him with the rhythm of something uncontainable—no longer blood, but ignition. He moved to intercept, shifting his position to wedge himself between the swarm and the hive, not out of strategy but spite. This wasn’t his mission. The necklace still waited. Their deaths were a mercy he didn’t owe.
But mercy had nothing to do with it.
He dropped into the thick of them like a curse made flesh. Shadows snapped out in vicious arcs, slicing through the nearest emitter before it could turn. Another lunged—Attica caught it mid-charge, drove a boot into its chest, and rode it down hard into the stone. It shattered with a shriek of dying light.
He didn’t stop.
He couldn’t.
His shade unraveled and lashed forward, cleaving a path into the horde. Attica moved with it, flanking a cluster of writhing light-forms.
He vaulted up, landed on an emitter’s back, and drove his blade down, next to its spine. Another tried to pulse—he stomped its core until it stopped twitching. The ground hissed with vaporized light and mana.
Attica flashed behind a shrieking emitter and severed its legs at the knee, dragging it down with a twist of sharpened shadow. Its body buckled, flickering. His shade surged beside him, slashing through an avian mid-dive. Wings crumpled and corpses tumbled.
Another avian hit Attica in a rush, wrapping tight around his frame just as two beams of light hammered into him. He staggered, teeth gritted, shadows burning against the flare. But he did not fall. He smiled through the pain. “Come on, then,” he hissed as more of them turned. “We’re just getting started.”
Attica barely flinched as the flashwraiths closed in, their heat pressing against him in waves. He raised one hand. Not in desperation—but invocation.
His new power answered, shadows peeling from the stone like skin from bone, rising from the hive’s cracked foundation, drawn from crevices and ancient hollows. A hundred slivered echoes of darkness surged toward Attica then passed, coalescing midair into a single writhing command as he used Shade Swarm.
They struck like a murder of ravenous crows, descending upon a battlefield, silent at first, graceful in their sweep before the unmaking began. Emitters were ripped apart mid-glow. Avians screamed as wings turned brittle and failed. A halo of flaring light burst outward, only to gutter and die in the same breath.
The screams faded, drawn out like threads that snapped all at once.
Silence fell, but it wasn’t still. The mist coiled through the carnage, weaving between ruined husks and scorched stone. Nothing moved. Nothing dared.
Attica crouched in the center of it, shoulders rising and falling with each ragged breath. He uncorked his other gourd with a flick of the wrist. The mana hit hard, liquid fire in the lungs, flooding his limbs, pulling tight the edges of his focus. For a moment, it felt like the ground rejected him, like gravity itself recoiled.
Pushing through the sensation, Attica vaulted forward, trailing shadow, his blade one of pure wrath.
Flashes lit the fog like lightning strikes as limbs snapped. Light burst, shrieked, and guttered.
He tore into the next cluster, a force of violence and purpose. One emitter tried to retreat; he drove it into the dirt with a downward slash and crushed its skull beneath his heel. Another shrieked and scattered radiant flares in all directions; his shade formed armor over him, devouring the blasts.
Attica moved through the flashwraiths. Each strike landed with the precision of rage honed over years. His grunts came low and brutal, not words, not threats, just sound carved from fury.
A rhythm of impact and motion, of shadow tearing through light.
Of revenge.
And still, the hive waited. The last of the outer guard collapsed behind him. He didn’t look back. Only forward, deeper, closer to its heart.
The interior of the hive unfolded around him—a labyrinth of pulsing light and bone-thin passageways, its walls alive with shifting veins of radiance that slithered like nerves beneath skin. But Attica didn’t need a path. He was the path.
His shade stretched ahead, a liquid silhouette threading through corridors and chambers, alert to every movement, every flicker, every wrong breath in the dark.
Two brighthowlers dropped from the upper spines with sharp cries, their forms crackling with searing intent.
Attica didn’t hesitate.
He turned, launched himself backward, and cast a tendril of shadow to a distant spire on the hive’s upper shell. It latched with a hiss, coiled tight, and pulled. His shade wrenched him skyward with violent speed.
An avian emitter dove toward him; Attica met it midair, blade first.
The impact shattered its neck. Light burst from its throat, the flare searing right past him. Essence poured into his chest, feeding his shade as Attica landed on an upper ledge.
He ran, blasts of light at his heels as another avian swept toward him. Attica twisted in the air and sent his shadowblade out, which caught a wing joint and ripped it sideways.
The avian spiraled down, shrieking until the ground silenced it. The last one in the air tried to blind him, but was ultimately too slow.
Attica hurled himself skyward again, the shadows coiling tight around his body, light flaring past him as he sailed higher than any living thing had a right to be. He slammed into the flying flashwraith with a bone-crushing knee, his blade punching straight through its chest.
But there were still emitters. And the two brighthowlers were still alive, still tracking him.
They clicked to one another in soft, insectile bursts, pulses of sound woven into a language older than light. His shade tightened, its edges flickering like torn silk before sealing to his skin—an instinctive recoil.
It remembered.
So did he.
This was the very flashwraith that had taken his eye. The same twin-headed thing that had burned half his world to ash.
Attica stepped forward anyway.
The power within him didn’t surge, it coalesced, dense and electric, as if every choice he’d made had led to this single, narrow moment.
The first brighthowler lunged, both heads snapping like blades.
Attica vanished through the hive wall to his right, shadow splitting, reforming, then reappeared behind the brighthowler in a burst of silent motion.
He drove his blade into the spinal seam beneath its left skull, a perfect insertion. He ripped the blade free, twisting as he did, and cast half the creature’s head and a sliver of neck to the ground with a wet thud.
The rest of its body buckled.
Attica didn’t wait.
He seized what remained and slammed it against a jagged outcrop of stone. His shade wrapped around him in sync, hardening just before impact—crushing bone, splintering light. The brighthowler broke apart in his hands.
The second one was already moving. It charged, light flaring wild in both mouths as Attica dropped low, shadow trailing. He slid beneath it and dragged his blade through both knees as he passed.
The brighthowler collapsed mid-sprint and hit the hive wall with a sickening, echoing crack.
Emitters appeared, scrambling to catch up to him alongside another brighthowler. One flanked from the side. The other two rushed from the front.
Attica let them come as raw energy seared through him.
The front brighthowler lunged. He stepped into it, cutting deep into the rib cage with a roar of grief—not a war cry, not anger—grief. The sound that came from him was wordless, broken, primal, as it spit light and soon choked on its own blood.
Its body still on his blade, Attica turned toward one of the emitters and bashed it with the brighthowler.
His shade lashed out toward the other on instinct, piercing through its light-filled mouth. It rushed toward another emitter and cut it down in a cross pattern that left the monster twitching in silence.
Attica absorbed their light as a few emitters tried to flee.
“Pathetic.” Attica sprinted after them, cutting the pair down with a single swing. His shade brought down another, then two more, as the hive burned, the flames lifting higher. “Find the rest,” he told his shade, giving it permission to leave him.
Attica felt its presence go. This would have been something he would never have attempted, but now, now he was confident that it was the right thing to do. Around him, flashes of light told Attica that his shade was doing exactly as he had requested. He stood there, watching it all, breathing heavily until the shadow returned.
“Good,” Attica told it as his shade settled around him. “You did good. We did good.”
He moved to a higher ridge and watched the hive burn. Attica crouched there, enjoying his show of strength. What he had just done was something no Vanguard would have ever attempted, yet he had killed a literal hive of Lightborn with relative ease.
Attica took a big inhale from his gourd and finished what was left of it, his shade buzzing with power by the time he was finished.
The flames burned higher, Attica taking it all in with a delight that he knew he wouldn’t be able to share with anyone else. No one had seen him do this, no one knew what he was truly capable of aside from Eve, Tiago, and now Luther.
And he was fine with that.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Luther found him a few minutes later, just as the last of the flames began to gutter and die.
Attica stood alone at the hive’s edge, the mist curling around his cloak, the ember glow of annihilation painting the sharp angles of his face. Smoke drifted from the shattered core, its twisted architecture still trying to hold shape after death.
He said nothing. Just watched.
The silence around him was total.
No more shrieks, no more pulses of light. Only the wind, the crackle of cooling flesh, and the faint hiss of mana bleeding into the stones. His hands still trembled slightly from the fury that had driven him.
Not from weakness, but from memory. With the help of his shade, Attica had moved through the hive like a beast carved from shadow, every strike an instinct.
Now, it was over.
But not done.
He kept seeing it—his own blood, that bright moment of pain, the wail that echoed in his skull when the brighthowler took his eye. The slow drift of Dayanne’s voice, the soft weight of Eli’s fingers. All of it crashing against the moment his blade tore through the hive.
It wasn’t enough. Attica wanted more.
The boy arrived quietly, his shape forming through the mist, more defined than before, less apparition, more presence. “How … ?” Luther asked, his voice barely rising above the smoke. He looked around the ruined hive, wide-eyed and blinking. “How did you do this?”
Attica turned toward him, his gaze unreadable. The mist curled tighter around his boots, drawn to him. “I told you I would kill them all.”
Luther took another long look around, awe settling into the lines of his misty face. “You did,” he finally said. “You really did.” He blinked, almost as if remembering something. “I found the necklace. I thought it would be deeper … buried somewhere at the core. But it was just in the wall. I can show it to you.”
“Good.” Attica stepped off the ledge, dropping down to the hive’s blackened floor. His shade caught the fall, softening the landing like smoke catching firelight. He rose without breaking stride and walked past a scorched avian carcass, its body still steaming, its face half dissolved in ash.
Luther waited near the hive wall, one hand lifted toward a narrow vein of crystalline growth, half melted but intact. “This way,” he said.
Attica pressed his hand into the cracked hive wall and pulled aside a cluster of fused organic plates. The necklace was there, intact, dark silver, wrapped around a piece of polished stone.
“Thank you, Luther.”
Attica turned back toward the basin—the burned-out center of his fury—where the hive lay in ruin, still leaking smoke into the mist.
Something moved.
A flicker, high above. Subtle, weightless. The shape drifted downward through the fog, small and alone, its form outlined in a faint, unnatural glow.
His blood went cold before thought could catch up. The figure slowed as it descended, turning midair, a leaf caught in a dream. And then it drifted past the cliff’s lip, vanishing over the edge and into the fourth tier.
Luther stepped closer, gaze trailing the same line through the mist. “What was that?”
“You haven’t seen it before?” Attica asked, not taking his eyes off the ledge.
Luther shook his head. “No.”
Attica’s voice came low, threat evident. “That was the child of light.” He stared into the void where it had disappeared. “My next target.”
“What is it?”
“That, I do not know. But it is what killed my people and destroyed my settlement.”
“A baby?” Luther asked.
“A baby.” Attica reached the precipice, the wind dragging at his cloak. Below, the fog churned. The faintest shimmer still lingered at the edge of sight, then was gone.
Attica stood there, unmoving, his fury cooling into something darker. He turned back toward the glowing portalstones he’d seen earlier. The Realm of Recumbency would offer clarity. And, more importantly, a refill.
The pile of portalstones lifted, one by one, as if drawn by an invisible rhythm. Cracked slabs of obsidian and veined quartz rose into the air, turning slowly, aligning with purpose older than speech.
In moments, they formed a floating arch, suspended by nothing, humming with a faint harmonic tension.
“Come,” Attica said, motioning for Luther to follow.
The boy hesitated. “You are certain?”
“You have more than earned it,” Attica said. “Come and be made real again.”
He stepped through, the Realm of Recumbency pulling at him—cool, weightless, reverent.
There was no sky here.
Only spiraling stairwells and shattered bridges, suspended in endless half light bathed in a twinkle of distant stars.
Above it all, Duchess Corvenna remained seated on her throne, unmoving, a sovereign of stillness. Her court stretched out in shadows, silent and half formed, like statues too weary to hold shape.
Attica’s shade rippled against his skin, uneasy. Even here, in this haven of rest, there was weight, a fear of the power in this unique space. He stepped toward the fountain at the heart of the realm and lowered his gourds into the slow-spilling stream of essence.
Behind him, Luther stared in wonder.
“Where are we?” the boy whispered. Attica didn’t answer at first. He just watched the glow ripple through the first gourd as it filled. “The Realm of Recumbency,” Attica finally said as Sebastian came down the steps, the boy in his fox mask.
Sebastian came to stop and examined the two of them. “Ah, you have brought your first resident.”
“Yes,” Attica said as Luther’s form took full shape beside him. The boy was dark-skinned like the others, with a faint orange sheen to his hair and a wiry frame stretched thin over wide shoulders. Too young and lean, but solid now.
“You came back faster than I expected,” Sebastian said, his voice amused but not unkind.
“I’m not staying,” Attica replied, unslinging his second gourd. “I need to refill and descend.”
Sebastian clasped his hands behind his back, watching him with mild curiosity. “Descend? You came from … ?”
“The third tier.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I located the child of light. It’s heading to the fourth tier,” Attica said as he finished with the gourds.
