Chapter Seven Hundred And Eighty Three – 783
Archie fell through the street and, for a brief moment, it was as if he ceased to exist.
It was always like this. Using Primeval Drift wasn't like closing his eyes. When he phased through solid matter, his sight stopped functioning entirely. His ears were deaf. His voice was muted. There was no color nor light, and even if there were, there was no way to take in that information—it was as if he were trying to look through his elbow. It wasn't just dark. It was a void of all things.
Thankfully, he had Blindsense.
Vibrations rippled through him as the Skill mustered, translating through the pattern in his chest and into his Mind. The world around him took on varying levels of clarity, extending outward in a fifty-foot radius. He could feel it through his skin, thrumming against him in lieu of light and sound. Closest, he felt rock and root, but he ignored them and narrowed his focus ahead and above, where the street and a certain snake knight resided. He flared Primeval Drift and shot forward.
The many layers over the earth tried to trip him up, each material slightly different from the rest and none of it uniform. Loam and rotting vegetation were everywhere, packed between layers of stone and wood where the road had sunk and been built anew. Deeper, clay clung wetly around tiny underground rivulets where rainwater pooled. He navigated it all, adjusting himself as he passed through with increasing Skill.
Primeval Drift is level 80!
All at once, the people pressed to the earth came into clarity. Above and ahead of him, he mapped them out: a dozen figures laid out on the ground, four shuffling pairs of guilder feet, and a massive, sinuous weight coiled around a heavy metal wagon. A vast pressure rippled across his attention, like a hammer dozens of feet across pressed heavily onto the prone figures. Liquid pooled around them, and their screams were bright vibrations into dust and dirt. The knight’s Skill was killing them.
Focus, idiot! Get ‘em and get out!
He sped to the surface, the waves of pressure shoving back at him like a heavy breeze, but no more. His hands broke through, grasping two arms before his Skill flowed around them. Into them, really, turning their solid flesh into trembling echoes.