LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

Elias made no sound even though he had just been impaled.

He had been expecting something like this to happen because he was always anticipating a hidden move from his prey.

It was foolish to ever think that his opponents would not have hidden abilities that could affect him, and the best way to deal with such unknown factors was to be prepared to be hurt, but manage the injury in such a manner that it would not hamper his ability to fight.

He could not block the finger that impaled him, but the cleaver was already on its way down toward the spike to sever it.

However, Elias did not finish the swing. The spike, which had entered him at great speed, kept moving, and it carried his body up off the ground and into the air in a single jolt that emptied his lungs and bent the cleaver's swing into a useless diagonal that cut nothing.

He hung from the spike, twelve feet off the floor, then twenty, then forty.

The seventh finger was longer than it had appeared, and it was lifting him toward the central swell of the mountain, where he saw a massive hidden mouth at the center of this mountain of flesh.

Elias was irritated by missing the first swing of his blade and was about to swing it again when the finger that penetrated his body suddenly transformed into massive spikes of bone.

His shield fell from his hand as his body exploded with dozens of spikes, and Elias's head slowly slumped to the side as his internals were shredded to pieces, and if not for his spine, which seemed to be made out of adamantite, Elias would have been cut into two gory pieces.

Behind him, on the floor, the formation began to break. He could hear them, distantly, through the rushing in his ears. Sera, swearing in a way she had not sworn in his hearing before.

Theron, shouting his name, alongside Elara, and then Kaelen, the most useful of the four in this moment, planted his palm on the ground and tried to extend the floor upward, not around them, but he had also sent a pillar toward Elias's dangling boots.

A small shrug from the mountain of flesh crushed the pillar, but the conscious effort to save him was surprising.

In the blink of an eye, the entire offensive move had changed, and victory no longer seemed possible.

"Ah, brother. Look how much you have grown feasting on my children. Come closer. Come the rest of the way. I want to taste you."

The spike kept lifting him, and his Vitality kept ticking down at the corner of his vision, but it was slowing down.

Even though he had been turned into a pincushion, Crimson Vein had held all his blood inside him, and he hardly bled; the trickle that escaped his body was slowly rising into the air or running up the finger to enter his body.

One of the yellow eyes suddenly transformed to blazing red, and harsh wheezing laughter emerged from that mouth,

"Hehehe… I won… I am the one who killed you."

Elias's head slowly turned to the side, and he gasped, "What are you?"

The cackling voice from the red eye crooned, "I am the Void Womb, a—"

"Silence!"

All the eyes transformed back to yellow, and the second consciousness that Elias had sensed was gone.

The Passenger was no longer laughing.

"Now," it said, very calmly. "Or never."

Elias, with the cleaver still in his right hand, did something that the mountain of flesh could not predict.

He moved his left hand; his motion was not particularly quick, and his hand fell to his hip, where the swarm had been holding a thing for him for three months.

The swarm parted at his thought, and the flower came out into his palm.

It was not a rose. It had only ever looked like a rose. Its bloom had once been ten centimeters across with five petals; now it had grown to nearly twelve centimeters across with six petals.

The sixth petal, which had been small and dim when he had crossed the threshold of the trial, was now the same size as the others and the same reddish gold color.

The stem was nine inches long, and along the stem, the small black thorns had grown to the length of fingernails, and they were not black, but the green of Elias's mortal eyes.

Even with his present durability and resistance, his hand began to darken the moment the swarm uncovered the flower.

The massive central mouth in the center of the Void Womb was now thirty feet from him, and the thousand other mouths had begun to scream a song in a weird language of madness.

The seventh finger jerked as it pushed him closer towards the mouth, and when Elias was twenty feet from it, he raised the flower.

"Why do I smell that bitch? I am nowhere near her temple."

Elias froze a bit as he felt the poison underneath his palm beginning to writhe, and the poison flowing through his hand began to accelerate.

It was as if this Divine Vestige recognized the voice from the Void Womb, and its movements nearly dragged it away from Elias's weakening grip.

Ten feet from the mouth, and Elias began to slowly lean forward.

This motion sent the countless spikes that were piercing through his body deeper into places they had not reached, and even with his pain tolerance, he could not help the groans of pain that emerged from his lips.

Pushing his body deeper into these spikes was one of the most painful experiences he had ever suffered, but his left arm, with the flower in its hand, came forward of his body.

The seventh finger could not stop him from doing this, because the seventh finger had been engineered to deliver, not to grasp, and the spike was holding his torso and not his arms.

Five feet from the massive open mouth, and the Passenger said, "Heart."

Elias did not respond, and as the top half of his body was pushed inside the slimy maw, he drove the stem of the flower into the roof of the mouth.

Then he released his hand that was struggling to hold on to the flower, and it began to move by itself.

The flower suddenly grew roots that began to spread all through the flesh of the Void Womb, branching through its alien physique and beginning to pierce through dozens of hearts in seconds as it was spreading.

This was not the killing move from the flower; its true lethality came from its poison.

The root fed on the flesh of the Void Womb, and in repayment, it gave nothing but poison.