The Feeding Ground was a valley of gray dust and silent screams. The Abyssal Taint had eaten the color, the sound, and the life from the area. The ground was a fine, ash-like powder that absorbed footsteps. The air was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature—it was the cold of absence.
At the valley's heart was the source: a pulsing, black cyst the size of a house, rooted into the earth. From it spread vein-like tendrils of purple-black energy that throbbed as they slowly digested the spiritual energy of the land. Around the cyst, humanoid figures shambled—Taint-Walkers, cultivators or natives consumed by the Abyss, their wills erased, now just extensions of its hunger.
"Plan?" Kiran whispered, his void-daggers already thirsting.
"The cyst is the core," Damien said, his storm-eyes seeing the flows of devouring energy. "The Walkers are distractions. Lyra, can you create a Mirage Realm around the cyst, make it 'forget' we're here for a few minutes?"
Lyra nodded, gripping her staff. "I can try. But the taint resists illusion. It might see through it quickly."
"Brom, you and I clear a path. Kiran, you go for the cyst. Your void is best at erasing this kind of non-corporeal energy. Once you make contact, I'll follow and use my daggers to sever its connection to the land."
They moved. Lyra raised her staff, foxfire blooming. She wove a Mirage Realm of Neglect, subtly editing the reality around the cyst to project the concept that they were unimportant, background noise. The Taint-Walkers paused, confused.
Brom and Damien charged. A Walker lunged at Brom—a woman with empty eyes and skin like cracked porcelain. Brom didn't swing his hammer. He stomped, using World-Drummer's Cadence. The ground beneath the Walker rose in a sharp spike of compacted earth, impaling it. It didn't die; it thrashed, trying to consume the earth-spike itself.
Damien faced two Walkers. He didn't use flashy techniques. He used efficiency. A Rime-Slip put him behind one; his Twilight Rend dagger phased into its spine, severing the taint's control. The body collapsed. The second Walker spewed a stream of devouring energy. Damien crossed his daggers, channeling frost and spatial energy to create a Frozen Eclipse Barrier. The devouring stream hit the barrier and was frozen in a lattice of icy nothingness before shattering.
They carved a path. Kiran blurred forward, void-daggers leaving trails of disintegrating space. He reached the cyst. It sensed him then, Lyra's illusion breaking. The cyst pulsed, and a dozen new tendrils shot toward Kiran.
Kiran didn't dodge. He activated Void-Swallow, creating a spinning disk of erasure before him. The tendrils hit the void and were unmade. But the cyst was vast. More tendrils came. Kiran gritted his teeth, his void straining. One tendril slipped past, wrapping around his ankle. Instantly, he felt a terrible suction, his own spiritual energy being pulled out. He cried out, slashing with a dagger to sever it, but the taint had already taken a bite. He stumbled, his aura dimming perceptibly.
"Kiran!" Lyra shouted, dropping her illusion to fire a bolt of foxfire that seared another tendril.
Damien reached the cyst. He could see the root-connections now—thick, pulsing cords of taint buried deep in the earth. He drove both Twilight Rend daggers into the base of the cyst and activated their spatial-phasing property at maximum. The daggers didn't cut outward; they sent phased vibrations down the roots.
The cyst shuddered violently. The tendrils recoiled from Kiran. A psychic wail of hunger and pain echoed in their minds.
But the fight wasn't over. Enraged, the cyst contracted, then exploded.
A wave of pure Abyssal energy erupted outward. Brom slammed his hammer down, raising an earthen wall. It was eaten through in seconds. Lyra threw up a Reality-Edit, trying to declare the wave "not real." The taint overpowered her edit, and she was thrown back, blood spraying from her mouth as her spell shattered.
Damien, at the epicenter, did the only thing he could. He opened his Glacial Devourer wide and ate the explosion.
It was like swallowing a star made of poison and endless want. The Abyssal energy flooded him, a tidal wave of mindless consumption that immediately began trying to devour him from the inside. His frost fought it, his spatial energy tried to contain it, his will strained to dominate it. His body locked up, veins turning black as the taint fought for control.
"DAMIEN!" Kiran roared, lunging forward through the fading wave. He plunged both void-daggers into Damien's chest—not to harm him, but to anchor his voids inside Damien's spiritual sea. He began forcibly voiding the taint, pulling it out and erasing it.
It was a desperate, dangerous procedure. Kiran's voids could just as easily erase Damien's core.
Lyra crawled over, her hands glowing with foxfire, weaving stabilization spells around Damien's soul. Brom stood guard, hammer ready, as the remaining Taint-Walkers, confused by the cyst's death-throes, staggered toward them.
For three agonizing minutes, Kiran and Lyra fought the internal battle. Damien was a battlefield. Finally, with a gasp that ejected a cloud of black frost, the last of the active taint was purged.
But not all of it. A fragment, subdued and trapped, remained in Damien's Glacial-Phoenix core. His Constitution had done what it did best: it had converted a piece of the enemy. Not safely, not cleanly—it was a trapped, raging little piece of the Abyss, held in a cage of frozen flame and spatial locks.
[Alert: Partial Abyssal Essence integration.
[Glacial-Phoenix Constitution evolution: 5%.
[New Property: 'Devouring Edge'—Frost and attacks now carry a minor entropy effect, causing what they touch to decay slightly faster.
[Warning: Abyssal influence detected in soul. Increased aggression/hunger possible. Monitor.]
Damien collapsed to his knees, vomiting gray sludge. He was alive, but he felt… hungry. Not for food. For energy. For more.
The valley was quiet. The cyst was gone, leaving only a scar of inert gray dust. The Walkers had collapsed, finally dead.
They were all injured. Kiran was spiritually drained from the voiding. Lyra had internal bleeding from her shattered spell. Brom had shallow, weeping wounds where the devouring wave had touched him. Damien felt like his insides had been scoured with acid and ice.
But they had won. They had taken a piece of a Singularity.
As they limped back toward the Anchor, supporting each other, Damien looked at his team. Not just allies. Not just friends. Comrades-in-arms. People who had just risked their souls to save his. The frozen calculus in his mind shifted another degree. They were no longer just assets. They were… necessary.
The path of conquest, he was learning, was walked with others. And that made the hunger inside him—both his and the Abyss's—a little less cold, a little more focused.
They had a long way to go to heal. But they had taken the first, real bite out of the cosmos. And the taste of Abyss, Damien thought as they stumbled home, was bitter, greasy, and strangely… familiar.