The mist enveloped Ash like a deadly shroud.
The swarm hit him with the force of a living wave. Dozens of creatures crashed against his cloak of mist, their rotating jaws searching for flesh, searching for blood, searching for life. But the mist confused them, disoriented their hundreds of eyes, turning their coordinated hunt into frantic chaos.
Ash wielded the Pale Needle.
The first strike pierced one of the creatures from side to side. The blade entered easily, its Piercing enchantment ignoring the leathery hide as if it were paper. The beast split into two halves that fell into the void.
The second strike cut another in half.
The third strike missed because the third creature simply... didn't die.
Ash felt the blade sink into the abomination's body, felt its essence brush against the soul core, and then... nothing. The creature shrieked, writhing against the sword, its jaws snapping inches from his face.
Damn.
The truth hit him with the coldness of a bucket of ice water. His flaw. That absurd, ridiculous, useless flaw that bound him to a rule as arbitrary as it was absolute: he could not kill anything weaker than himself.
And these creatures, individually, were weak. Very weak.
Too weak.
"Damn it!" he spat, pushing the creature away with a flat strike that sent it tumbling into its comrades.
The echo moved beside him, its electrified wings cutting through the air. The Steel Raven did not share its master's limitations. One of its wings, charged with electricity, struck three creatures at once. Their bodies convulsed, charred, and spiraled down toward the crimson coral.
Three dead, Ash calculated. Out of hundreds.
This is absurd. The situation is absurd, he thought with a bitter, amused grimace. Exactly the kind of cruel joke the Nightmare Spell loved.
He, who had spent weeks killing abominations with the ease of a reaper harvesting wheat, was now unable to finish off the swarm's most basic creatures because he was too strong.
Every strike he made was a useless lash, violence that wounded but did not kill, damaged but did not destroy.
The wounded creatures writhed in the air, their bodies dripping black blood, and fell downward. Yet more replaced them with more fury, more hunger, more madness.
"Change of plans!" Ash shouted, more to himself than to the echo.
The mist expanded violently, creating a white wall between him and the heart of the swarm. The creatures scattered, confused, losing their coordination. Without their synchronized hunt, they were nothing more than a mass of blind beasts striking against an invisible wall.
Ash seized the moment to carve a curve through the air, moving away from the center of the mass, using the abominations as footholds to maneuver between them.
"You handle the killing," he ordered the echo, his voice sharp. "I'll keep them busy."
The Steel Raven let out a metallic shriek, and its wings spread to their full extent. The electricity that had been dancing among its feathers exploded outward in concentric waves, turning the area into an electric storm.
The echo launched into the swarm like a living lightning bolt.
Ash, for his part, stopped trying to kill.
He became a blind scythe. He didn't cut to destroy; he cut to deflect. Each strike of the Pale Needle was calculated, almost surgical, designed to interrupt, to break formations, to send entire creatures tumbling into their comrades and disrupt their synchronization.
Three creatures lunged at him from the left. Ash spun, his body moving with the fluidity of a dancer in a nightmare. The first received a blow to its side that sent it crashing into the second; the third found its jaws caught in the mantle of mist, spinning in blind circles until it collided with another of its kind. Then he kicked another away, sending it into others to avoid falling.
Two more from above. Ash dodged them by centimeters, their bodies grazing his cloak as they passed, and followed them with a flick of his wrist that opened superficial cuts in their wings. Not lethal. But enough to unbalance them.
They spiraled toward the ground, shrieking in frustration.
"That's right," Ash murmured, and there was a note of dark amusement in his voice. "You can't hunt what you can't see."
The mist intensified.
The mantle of fog expanded to cover an area dozens of meters around, turning the sky into a white, blind sea. Within that mist, Ash was a ghost. Not a warrior, not a killer. He was an elusive presence, a whisper at the edge of the swarm's perception, a pain that appeared and disappeared without a trace.
A strike here. A cut there. One creature sent crashing into another, its jaws snapping at empty air while its prey had already moved to the next target.
He couldn't kill them.
But he could make them wish they hadn't crossed his path.
The echo, meanwhile, was reaping a bloody harvest. The Steel Raven moved like a trained assassin, its metallic claws tearing bodies, its beak piercing chitinous armor, its electrified body turning the air around it into a zone of death.
Where Ash was confusion, the echo was devastating force.
Together, they formed an imperfect but effective war machine.
Ash broke the swarm's lines, undid their coordination, blinded them with mist and constant movement. And the echo, free from its master's limitations, exploited every gap, every opportunity, to reduce the horde's numbers.
One creature managed to break through the mist.
Ash didn't see it coming until he felt the wind at the back of his neck. Pure instinct moved his body, spinning in the air with a use of his aspect that defied gravity. The beast's jaws snapped shut on the air where his head had been a second before.
The Pale Needle moved by reflex, piercing the creature's head from side to side.
It didn't die.
Of course not.
But it was blinded, disoriented, its jaws spinning in spirals as it plunged downward.
Ash cursed under his breath as he reoriented himself in the air. The fight was exhausting. Not physically—his stamina, thanks to the Sword of Seven and his accumulated fragments, was almost perpetual—but mentally. Every movement required calculation, precision, an absolute awareness of where each creature was and where the next was moving.
It was like playing chess against a hundred opponents at once, in three dimensions, with the board on fire.
The echo screeched from somewhere to his left. Ash interpreted the sound without needing words: the swarm is losing cohesion.
It was true. What had been a compact, organized mass was now a chaotic scattering of confused beasts. Without their synchronized hunt, without their ability to overwhelm with numbers and coordination, they were just individual flying monsters. Dangerous, yes. But not invincible.
Ash allowed a smile to tug at his lips.
"Tired already?" he asked the empty air, as if the swarm could hear him. "Too bad. I was just starting to have fun."
The mist swirled around him, dense and cold, as he assessed the battlefield. The echo had reduced the swarm's numbers by at least a third; the charred bodies of the creatures fell like black rain toward the Dark Sea. The rest, disorganized and frightened, began to retreat.
They weren't fleeing, not exactly. They simply... stopped attacking with the same ferocity. Their movements became erratic, their formations nonexistent. Survival instinct, that ancient program that even the simplest abominations possessed, was winning the battle against hunger.
Ash called to the echo, which caught him in freefall. Not using the flying monsters' bodies as footholds, he began to fall. But the echo caught him on its metallic back.
Ash watched through the mist as the creatures veered off in another direction. He could pursue them, eliminate them using his echo, but he wouldn't.
He would gain no benefit from it.
Besides.
It wasn't his job to clear the sky, he thought. I just need to get through.
"Good work," he said.
The Steel Raven emitted a deep sound, almost proud.
The last members of the swarm were now moving away, seeking safer skies. Some veered north, others east, scattering across the horizon like black seeds on the wind.
Ash waited until the last dark dot disappeared among the low clouds, then deactivated the Mantle of Mist. The fog slowly dissipated, revealing an empty sky and a Dark Sea gleaming far below like liquid obsidian.
The Pale Needle vanished into his soul.
"Ready to continue?" he asked the echo.
The creature spread its wings, and Ash mounted its back with practiced fluidity. The metallic feathers were warm beneath his hands, the echo still vibrating with the residual electricity from the battle.
But they were alive. That was what mattered.
As they ascended again toward the heights, Ash looked back toward where the swarm had become a blurry smudge on the horizon.
If you can't kill them, he thought with a tired smile, bring them down and keep moving.
Since night had fallen, they looked for a high place to rest until sunrise.