Elias awoke choking.
Pain immediately followed. A burning sensation spread through his chest. His side was on fire. His lungs burned. He could feel the angler fish's teeth still embedded in his flesh, its lantern blazing somewhere above him, its hunger pressing against his soul.
For several seconds he simply floated there.
Dazed.
Disoriented. Then memory returned.
The seabeast's biting him and dragging him into its ball of water.
His attempt at predation.
'Oh...' His thoughts emerged weakly.
'I blacked out.'
Only for a few seconds. Maybe a minute. He could not be sure. Time felt strange, he didn't even know how long he had been submerged.
'Shouldn't Dante or Jamie try to save me right now or something?' He wondered.
His thoughts drifted toward the vision. Angram. The chasm. The beast. The stone dagger. It had been a long time since he'd experienced one. Long enough that he almost forgot they existed.
Why now?
Why that boy?
Why that memory?
Elias didn't know. He pushed the thought aside. The fish was still trying to consume him. He could feel its essence pressing against his, trying to break him down, trying to absorb him.
Just like the beast in the vision.
The difference was that Elias understood what was happening. This seabeast was one of the ocean's most dangerous predators not because it was physically strong but ecause it consumed.
Everything about it revolved around consumption.
'But Angram had survived. Angram had fought back. Angram had eaten.'
Elias's eyes narrowed.
He could feel the fish's power at work, stretched through his body like roots. It was not just physical consumption—it was deeper. It was trying to break down his soul, his essence, his very existence. To absorb him piece by piece since it could not devour him whole.
His soul felt thinner.
His thoughts felt slower as fragments of him were slowly being broken off and consumed by the fish.
It hurt.
Gods.
It hurt.
At the same time another sensation lingered beneath the agony.
An itch.
A familiar itch, the same feeling that accompanied healing wounds.
His eyes widened.
Accelerated Healing? Could it work on the soul? On the mind?
Maybe....he was sane enough tothink and his soul didn't shatter from impact and was holding just enough to prevent him from becoming hollow.
Maybe not....For some reason his perception of time seemed skewed as a result of the consumption in the first place so he might as well have already gone insane or delirious.
It didn't matter right now.
The important thing was surviving.
Elias closed his eyes and fully accepted the agony. The pain of bleeding out. The pain of drowning continously. The headache he was getting from being thrashed around. The pain of having his side disconnected from the rest of his body. The pain of his mind being torn like fabric and taken away piece by piece. The pain of having his soul being bitten down on by metaphysical clamps and the force on it as if it was glass that could shatter at any moment.
A normal person would have gone insane from all this pain. But Elias wasn't a normal person. One thing Humans used to preserve their sanity in desperate situations was faith. Faith thats someone would save them. Faith that a loved one was not truly dead. Faith that one day the world would be a better place. Faith however was nothing but Delusional Idealism and existence had ways of relieving the mob of such ideals. That was the unfairness of the world.
Ironically, despite this being Elias' definition of faith, it was faith that was keeping him sane enough to carry out his current endeavour. The faith that his Accelerate Heal was enough to keep him from breaking apart. There are four layers by which reality operated by. Concepts, Notions, Ideas and Abstracts.As an Acolyte, Elias couldn't fully control the first layer but he could influence it to an extent. Just like how Jamie had influenced the concept that ice could make things brittle and escaped the grip of the votary in the market, he reinforced his regenerative ability by influenecing healing itself.
The seabeast however was a higher existence, on the level to a Praetorian like Dante and there fore operated on the second layer, being fully able to consume Notions, the truths that give birth to concepts. So on the normal it should have bypassed hispuny manipulation and consumed him.
But It was weakened, courtesey of dante, and Elias'soul was just that vast. That notwithstanding, if Elias didnt hurry up or disengage himself, he would be consumed for real.
Pushing the agony aside, he began thinking, observing, learning. The Angler was teaching him.
Consistency and Precision, just like Angram had done in the vision.His Soul Predation had always been incomplete. He had used it to break down the shards of Ortis's soul, to counter the Kitsune's attempt to consume him. But he had never fully understood it. He had never mastered it. In fact it shouldn't even be called Predation but rather overload because that was what he was doing. Overloading something with his own essence till it roke down as a result of the saturation. A form of corruption but not actual predation.
However, by comparing his approach to what the beast was doing to him now, he noticed the critical difference between the two occurances. That being that the angler fish was going through three stages in it attempt to consume him.
Consume.
The Angler fish wasn't absorbing energy. It was taking it like how one would take bites out of food. He reached inward and took the fish's essence into himself. The pain intensified. His soul screamed. The fish's hunger clawed at his consciousness, trying to overwhelm him. Elias laughed weakly.
Blood drifted from his mouth
Digest.
The creature wasn't simply collecting power, it was processing it, converting it. Transforming it into something useful.
Elias' breathing grew ragged. The lesson unfolded piece by piece.
He focused on the point where the fish's essence entered his body. It is then that he saturated it but this time in controlled quantities until all the beasts own essence was broken down. His vision blurred.
Absorb.
He drew the broken-down essence into himself. Not as a foreign object, but as nourishment. His soul drank it in.
The fish thrashed.
Its lantern flared. Its teeth tightened in his side. It could feel what he was doing—and it did not like it. Elias felt the itch again. So his soul actually did heal.
The fish was fighting back.
Its essence surged against him, wild and desperate. It was a Dominion Beast—older, stronger, more experienced in consumption than he was. It had been consuming for centuries. He had been practicing for months.
But he had something it did not. Infinate Flow.
He could afford to make mistakes. He could feel it, he was exceeding his current output capacity, time was running out.
The fish's essence pressed against his soul, trying to reassert dominance. Elias did not resist. He redirected.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Consume. Digest. Absorb.
Elias' body felt heavy.
He was winning.
Maybe.
Or maybe he was dying more efficiently.
Honestly?
Either outcome was acceptable.
The thought surprised him.
Angram fought because he wanted to live. Elias fought because...because why not? The nihilism should have frightened him. Instead it felt strangely peaceful.
'More of Jamie is rubbing off on me.'
Consume. Break down. Absorb. Each cycle was faster than the last. His soul was learning. Adapting. Evolving. His breathing became ragged. His consciousness flickered. Darkness crept inward. The ocean disappeared. His senses faded. Yet through it all he held onto the lesson.
Relentless.
Like Angram stabbing the same wound. The fish's thrashing became weaker.
Its lantern dimmed.
Its teeth loosened.
Elias could feel the creature's confusion, its fear. It had never encountered prey that could fight back like this. It had never encountered prey that could eat back.
He absorbed more of its essence. Until finally—the pressure broke. Elias gasped and his eyes flew open.
The fish went still.
Its lantern went dark.
Elias lay in the water, gasping, dazed. The fish's teeth were still in his side, but the pressure was gone. The hunger was gone.
He had done it.
He had figured out the secret.
Dante's hand closed around his arm and pulled him from the sphere. The water broke around them, and Elias collapsed onto the floor of the laboratory, shivering, bleeding, alive.
Jamie rushed to his side.
"ELLIE!"
Elias puked out water and turned on his back, staring at the ceiling.
Predation.
Not just infusing. Not just destroying.
Consuming. Digesting. Absorbing.
He was tired. He closed his eyes and allowed darkness to swallow him.