The fighting Warriors froze mid-strike. Weapons hung in the air, forgotten. Even Uncle Adam's rampaging body went still, his blood-soaked hands falling to his sides as his eyes fixed on something over The Butcher's shoulder.
His expression shifted from grief-mad rage to something else entirely.
Something like disbelief and hope.
The Butcher blinked and frowned at this sudden stillness. His own senses caught up a moment later, registering a presence behind him that had not been there before. A warmth. A light. Something that made the Mana in his own body recoil with instinctive unease.
He turned around to see...
An utterly obscene and glorious scene.
The corpse of the Lesser Thing had lifted off the ground.
His thin body floated several inches above the blood-soaked earth, suspended by forces that should not exist. His arms hung limp at his sides. His head was tilted back, dark hair falling away from a face that held no conscious expression.
His chest area looked bloody and mangled, the rough-woven cloth torn apart to reveal the devastation beneath. Flesh had been ripped open. Ribs had been shattered. The wound was mortal by any definition, a hole where vital organs should have been.
And yet...
Where his heart used to be, a blinding blue light of fire shone.
It was not the blue of Mana that Warriors knew. Not the serpentine tendrils that marked those who had achieved Flesh Awakening. This was something older!
A blue so pure and so ancient that it seemed to predate the very concept of color itself.
The fire felt heavy.
Even from a distance, The Butcher could sense its weight pressing against space. It was as if this flame carried the mass of mountains within its flickering depths.
It burned furiously around Damian's heart.
And as The Butcher watched with wide eyes, the impossible happened.
The torn flesh began to move.
Muscle fibers reached for each other across the gap, knitting together with impossible speed. Shattered ribs shifted back into alignment, the bone fusing as if it had never been broken. Skin crawled across the healing wound like water flowing uphill, covering what should have remained exposed forever.
The flames wrapped around the injured chest as if they were doing more than healing.
As if they were purifying.
They moved with purpose, with intention. They burned away something invisible, something that one could not see. Impurities. Blockages. Damage that went deeper than mere flesh and bone.
And then, moments later, these blue flames seemingly shot across Damian's entire body.
They raced along his limbs like living things, diving beneath his skin and emerging elsewhere. They touched every part of him, leaving trails of faint luminescence in their wake. His spine arched as the flames reached everything. His fingers twitched as they purified his extremities.
Something was being burned away, something that had been broken for a very long time!
It was at this time that Damian heaved.
The sound was like a man waking after being battered by the hooves of a Primal Beast. A desperate gasp for air. A violent return to consciousness. His eyes snapped open, and for one brief moment, they reflected the blue flames that still danced across his form.
Then his body that was floating a few inches in the air crashed back down.
DUM!
The sound was not the sound of a mere sack of meat hitting sand and stone.
It was heavier and denser.
As if what had landed weighed more than what had been lifted.
...!
There was utter silence in the surroundings.
Warriors of both tribes stood frozen, their conflict forgotten in the face of something none of them could explain. The weeping survivors had stopped their grief. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath, unwilling to disturb this moment.
Damian's eyes refocused.
At this moment in time, he felt his body feel absolutely different than anytime it had felt in the last few years.
It felt... alive.
WAA!
The blue flames raging around him died down just as quickly as they had started. They retreated into his chest, sinking beneath his skin, vanishing as if they had never been. The oppressive weight they had carried disappeared with them, leaving only the ordinary heaviness of the morning air.
He touched his chest to feel... his skin once more.
No blood.
No injuries.
His fingers traced where the wound had been, where the spear had torn through him, where his heart had been shredded by Mana-infused stone. There was nothing. Not even a scar. Just smooth skin beneath the tattered remains of his wrappings.
Well, the only blood was on his wrappings themselves, staining the rough cloth crimson.
But more than this was what he FELT inside his body.
He felt the whispers of Mana.
Not the sense of dryness and desolation that had haunted him for years. Not the emptiness where something vital should have been. Not the hollowness that echoed with every heartbeat.
He could feel the lifeblood of the Lands of Stone flowing around him! Through him. He could sense it in the earth beneath his feet, in the air filling his lungs, in the faint glow of the distant mountain. And more than sensing it...
He could draw it in.
He could be alive again.
It was terrifying to experience such a sensation again when it had been taken away from him so long ago. The familiar warmth of Mana seeping into flesh that could finally hold it. The tingling at the edge of perception that marked the beginning of true power.
But he knew it was all connected to that word.
Well, he had said it out loud as a word, but it was merely a letter. The more he tried to remember it, the more he realized it even seemed to be a fraction of a letter in a language that felt as old or older than the Lands of Stone themselves.
The Primordial Tongue.
'Persev-...!'
He tried to merely think it, but he felt a force as if he was pulling on a muscle to activate something grand. The blue flames stirred in his chest, eager to emerge again. He could sense that if he even finished saying the word, those flames might appear once more.
So he stopped.
Uttering that word had recovered him from a supposedly mortal injury and healed him faster than what any Flesh Awakening Warrior could accomplish. It had purified something in his body, burned away the damage to his foundation that he had carried for years.
He had to proceed carefully with it.
Like everything in the Lands of Stone, it was a tool.
And tools had to be used properly. He just needed to learn the full extent of what this word did to him every time he uttered it out.
He clenched his fists and breathed out as he stopped thinking.
Thinking was good. But someone who thought all the time had nothing else in their minds but thoughts and imagination. A moment came when one had to act.
And action this time meant dealing with a bloodthirsty Warrior who was looking at him with heavy eyes.
As if he were looking at an abomination.
"You should be dead..."
The Butcher's voice was quiet. Uncertain for the first time since he had arrived at the Purple Stone Tribe.
Damian felt his body and the rich Mana he could sense in the surroundings. He knelt down slowly, deliberately, and picked up the two halves of the broken spear that lay near his feet. The wood was still solid. The stone head was still sharp enough to kill.
He rose and met The Butcher's gaze.
"Who decided that?"
BOOM!