It's the forty-eighth day since the Second Epoch Cycle began. I'm already sick of counting days, which said a lot because I usually loved keeping track of things just to tease Veneri about how long he'd been ignoring sleep.
The Graveyard of Bones has a way of making time feel like it was dragging itself through mud. For the last three days since we arrived, we've been doing nothing but fighting Scavenger Rank Krepsunas, and not the normal kind either. These ones were worse, twisted by whatever ancient curse saturated this place. Their regeneration was amplified to the point where killing them felt less like combat and more like trying to erase a mistake that kept rewriting itself.
A normal Krepsuna already had an irritatingly good healing factor but here in the Graveyard of Bones, they regenerated ten times faster. I timed it myself, of course. Two seconds was all it took for a Scavenger Rank to pull itself back together after being torn apart. If we relied on ordinary physical destruction, we would have been stuck in an infinite loop of cutting them down and watching them stand right back up again.
That was why we had to rely on Soul Energy and the Phase Slash enchantment embedded within Calimostria. Phase Slash can cut through the soul and incorporeal beings and objects. Once the soul is slashed, even the Graveyard's grotesque regeneration couldn't reattach what had already been severed on a metaphysical level. It was one of the few things in this cursed land that felt reliable. It made Calimostria look even more terrifying than usual whenever Veneri used it.
Honestly though, if there was one good thing about being stuck here, it was that this version of Veneri was absurdly strong. Out of all Five Pentarchs, Water Veneri is easily the most dangerous.
He has Omniphage for starters, which is already a ridiculous Tether in any context. The way he could absorb energy like a vacuum cleaner (according to his definition of how Omniphage felt like him) made him a walking catastrophe for anything that relied on repetition or attrition, which described Krepsunas perfectly. Every time one of them tried to regenerate using the same corrupted pattern, he learned from it. Every time they leaked that foul, decaying energy into the air, he absorbed traces of it.
Then there was his Water Divinity itself which, in this isolated state, felt completely different from what I've seen before. Back when all his Divinities were active at full capacity, they balanced each other out. But here, as Water Veneri, his aquatic authority was allowed to become what it probably should have been from the beginning. The way he manipulated moisture in the air, the way he condensed vapor into blades, chains, and entire tidal surges inside a land that barely had any water at all, it was beautiful in a terrifying way.
It felt less like he was using water and more like the concept of water itself was responding to him out of respect. It reminded me that he's know of the three beings who can create water and manipulate it.
His Mystic Eyes of Awareness only made it worse for his enemies. I could watch him stand completely still while a Krepsuna lunged at him from behind, only for him to tilt his head to the side and let its claws pass through empty air. Fighting someone who could perceive that much detail was like trying to ambush the sky.
And as if that wasn't enough, he also had his Codex, The Ingenious Prince.
I used to joke that the Codex was basically a cheat sheet written by a future version of him that had gotten bored and decided to spoil the plot. Combined with his natural intellect, it made him dangerously efficient. There were times when I swore he'd already decided how a battle would end before the first blow was even struck.
Which was why, by the time we finally reached the makeshift base established by Dynasty Fedres and Dynasty Skyrover, I wasn't worried about us losing. I was just worried about how bad things must have gotten for those two Dynasties to hole themselves up in the middle of a literal bone field and still be on the losing ground.
The ground was littered with colossal ribs and half-buried skulls. Some of them were larger than buildings. We moved through them like ants crawling through the remains of dead titans. When we finally crested a ridge formed by a pile of interlocked vertebrae, the battlefield opened up in front of us. Even I had to pause for a second just to take it all in.
Farrynelle and Xander were fighting side by side, and they were up against a Scavenger Rank Krepsuna that towered over them at nearly ten meters tall. The creature's body was a grotesque mass of flesh and bone with black veins pulsing across its grayish hide. Its head was nothing more than a twisted cluster of teeth and eyeless sockets and every time it was slashed, its regeneration healed it almost instantly.
Farrynelle was a literal blur of lightning. Her Lightning Divinity wrapped around her body in crackling arcs of blue. Each step she took detonated the ground beneath her feet in bursts of electrical discharge. She ran in and out of the Krepsuna's reach with every strike aimed at joints, tendons and exposed weak points.
When she swung her chakrams, lightning emerged her blade in branching streaks that split and rejoined. Each hit she landed carved deep, smoking gashes into the monster's flesh and for a split second, the regeneration faltered under the overwhelming interference.
Xander, on the other hand, fought like a monster. His Mist Adaptation Divinity cloaked him in a constantly shifting veil of dense, silver-gray fog that responded to incoming attacks before they even made contact. When the Krepsuna's massive claws swept toward him, the mist condensed into hardened layers, diffusing the impact and redirecting the force around his body.
Hus strikes were slower than Farrynelle's but infinitely heavier. Each blow carried the weight of compressed mist that exploded on contact like a controlled shockwave. They complemented each other perfectly.
Farrynelle kept the Krepsuna's attention, forcing it to focus on her, while Xander controlled the battlefield, intercepting any attack that threatened to corner her or cut off her escape routes. At one point, the Krepsuna slammed both of its massive arms downward, trying to crush Farrynelle between them, only for Xander turn his mist into a colossal barrier that caught the blow and dispersed it into a rolling wave of vapor.
Farrynelle used that opening immediately.
Lightning gathered along her legs and weapon, forming a blinding spear of pure electrical energy. She drove it straight into the Krepsuna's shoulder joint. The explosion that followed lit up the bone-strewn horizon like a second sun. The creature roared as electricity coursed through its nervous system but even then, I could already see its regeneration kicking in.
"They're losing."
The signs were obvious. Their movements were getting slower and the Krepsuna, despite all the damage it had taken, was still standing tall and regenerating.
"Well, guess we can't just stand here and admire the view, can we, Veneri?"
"Yeah. Let's end this for them. Once that Krepsuna is dead, the others will have an easier time fighting it."