Threads of the Soul

Chapter 438 - 438: I'm doing my part

The Lion-Centaur let out a thunderous roar that echoed throughout the depths of the vast tunnel network. It was supposed to be a threat, that any who came here were coming to their deaths.But these insects failed the understand such a basic warning. Instead all they heard was food calling out to them, demanding to be eaten. All they heard was an intruder defiantly asserting their presence in their home as if it meant they owned the place.

All they heard, was something demanding to be killed, maimed and eaten and they were more than eager to oblige such a request.

Not that the Lion cared at all about their thoughts, or the fact they ignored the command of his roar. In fact, he too seemed eager for them to approach as he let out more deafening roars. Not just as a threat or a signal, but as a way to tear apart these ignorant bugs.

The air vibrated and turned into a turbulent sea of sound waves with every roar. The sea eagerly swallowed up the bugs, shaking their armour so quickly and violently that it simply started to collapse under the stress of its own existence.

The sea tore them to shreds, completely destroying the smaller one's and turning the larger ones into the perfect, defenceless targets for his claws to rip apart instead. He was absolutely loving it, ripping them apart with teeth and claw and devouring them with glee right here on the battlefield.

There was more than one occasion that he threw a smaller one into his mouth, while it was still alive, before just biting down on it and popping its body like a grape that he quickly gulped down.

He was not the only one taking joy in the bloodshed. Eager to make his forefathers proud, the American Xander had manifested a belt fed light machine gun out of lord only knows where. Much like his revolvers, as this machine gun sat in his hands, it had become dazzling with a golden coat covering its every inch.

The gun totting american was laughing maniacally as he unloaded an endless hail of bullets into the relentless waves of bugs that were surging towards him.

Endless hail of bullets was not an exaggeration either. Although the gun was belt fed, the belt itself looped underneath his coat and yet no matter how many bullets he pumped out they never saw the other side of that belt.

While most of his endless slew of bullets being spewed out from the maw of his iron dragon were regular bullets, in the sense that they just blasted holes in his targets instead of creating any more effects such as fire of exploding. The more that he killed, the more that the American began to pale.

Yet it also happened to be that his bullet stream slowly but surely started to become more filled with acidic rounds. They would burst against the hides and armour of the bugs, melting them rapidly with a familiar yellow acid, before another bullet followed quickly followed after it and took advantage of the lack of armour.

That was a detail Corvus made sure to take a mental note of as he worked out how their powers worked. Fortunately others were more obvious in their abilities.

The Russian Captain was more conservative in his attacks, but still had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his ability to Corvus. The air itself turned sharp as a knife as he sent dozens of precise, targeted air slashes into the horde with nothing but a wave of his hand.

The air slashes tore apart the bugs with ease, and was flexible enough to sneak between the cracks and slight gaps in their chitinous armour. The air slashes would sneak between those minuscule gaps, where no normal weapon would ever be able to penetrate, and started o shred them apart with thousands of tiny wind blades, like dozens of blends strapped together.

If only the other people within the tunnels did not need the surrounding air to breathe, he would have been able to do so much more. A part of him was already weighing the option of simply using the air for himself and letting their lungs explode from the rapid vacuum forming. But he placed that idea to the side for now. It wasn't necessary just yet, but perhaps soon.

The Chinese Leader Yuan's mutation was unexpected, yet somehow expected at the exact same time. Between the horns and the scales, Corvus had expected him to be draconic, just like his now deceased black dragon companion. But that turned out to only be half correct.

Yuan took the form of a humanoid dragon. Just over 7 feet tall, he resembled an overgrown kobold. The main difference being the antler-like horns sprouting from his head, as well as the fact his scales were green instead of the red common amongst the kobolds. His appearance was closer to a traditional Chinese dragon rather than the type he was used to seeing.

That was mainly down to the fact he had what Corvus could only describe as whiskers. Two long, tendril-like growths sprouted from his draconic snout, like he was part catfish, which he was able to control like another set of limbs. He mainly used them like whips, or just to grab things out of the air when they leapt towards his face.

As he fought his scales glimmered and shined in the shifting light that illuminated the tunnels, including the light of Astra blasting constant bolts of lightning through the bodies of the bugs. As far as Corvus could tell, Yuan's scales were made of a sort of emerald jade. Smooth, gorgeous and impenetrable.

This jade coating grew over his claws, giving them an extra deadly cutting edge that he used to chop the bugs in half with his bare hand.

The fighting style of this humanoid dragon was much more refined than anyone else, hinting at the decades of martial arts training that had been honed into the very being of his existence, long before the apocalypse had descended. Training that was serving him incredibly well now as even the bugs blood couldn't hope to touch his shadow.

Due to his identity, Corvus had to rely mostly on the use of his loyal puppets, just like when he had first started in this world. But he had vastly improved his control since then, and his mind had expanded enough that he could easily handle multiple streams of conflicting visual data at once.

Instead of moving as one entity, repeating and copying each other as their puppeteer struggled to keep up, they moved as completely individual beings. Each puppet tearing apart their enemy without hesitation, input delay or mistake from being given the wrong order.

Best of all, they moved with the understanding of what the one's next to them were going to do before they even did it. It was more than different parts of one machine working in harmony, it was dozens of machines working in perfect understanding and sync to achieve a singular goal.

When he first gained his powers, he had likened his control of his puppets to controlling two video game characters with two different controllers, one operated with his hands and the other with his feet.

Over time, he had gained automation to keep the foot controlled character under control while he focused on the one in his hands. But now, even though the amount of controllers was ten times what he had struggled with in the beginning, it was as if he had grown twenty new sets of hands for those controllers and twenty new sets of eyes to watch all the screens at once.

What he had struggled with before seemed so pathetically simple. What he was doing now was just... natural. As if this was what he was always meant to be. As that thought crossed his mind, something inside Corvus shifted. He couldn't tell what or where it even shifted to or from... Just that it did.

Like staring at your girlfriend as you desperately try to puzzle together the impossible riddle asked of 'Well, do you notice anything different about me?'.

While he could not solve such an impossible task, nor could he use the abilities of the identity he had left behind, that did not mean Corvus was entirely reliant on his puppets. While they were fighting on the furthest edges of the group, Corvus had constructed an invisible web of threads intricately woven together that surrounded the less powerful of the group, such as Woe.

Against creatures whose strength came from their biology, Woe was absolutely useless. It was the downside of his ability.

He kept the threads in their soul form, making them impossible to detect, and every time one of the bugs leapt towards the crowd, the threads would manifest themselves around the enemy and tighten their weave to slice them to pieces.

Green blood and chunks of bug rained onto the ground as Corvus' web of threads turned intangible once more. However, as he did so he felt a strange movement in his web as something was plucking at it.