The pain hadn’t caught up with the shock yet, but Cael was growing increasingly distraught about his arm laying on the ground in front of him. His elbow was never meant to be that far from his right shoulder. Even more distressing was the fact that his disconnected arm began to change as soon as it was separated from the rest of him.

The color rapidly leached out of the limb, leaving it pale and smooth like a mannequin limb. Black blood seeped out of it like machine oil, staining the blankets at his feet.

Then he felt it. A burning ache overlaid by a stinging agony. Each was worse than anything he had ever felt from the slaver’s collar. Neither stopped, and Cael found himself falling to his knees.

He couldn’t even think properly, torn between wanting to cradle the bleeding stump and not wanting anything to touch it at all.

Congratulations, you have gained a [Skill].

[Pain Tolerance] has been added to your [General Skill List].

Cael panted heavily between short, sobbing wails.

Nothing else in the plaza dared to make a noise. The hedgehog-like creature had frozen in terror beneath the blankets. The shadow elemental too, seemed reluctant to move.

Until it did. It crept forward slowly, formlessly shifting toward Cael.

“No… stop.” he stuttered desperately, falling away from the void in reality. He crawled backward with a shaky blood-covered hand and crumpled when his missing right arm failed to do the same. He'd never had a chance to escape.

The elemental surged forward and swept up the arm before it wrapped Cael’s legs in shadow and dragged him into the darkness. He yelped before the world once more went dark around him.

The blackness reminds him of Trista’s teleport, but so much worse. He would give his other arm to be teleported now. A million times, he would have picked the disorientation and nausea over the suffocating abyss and its crushing pressure.

Hundreds of sharp black blades ran their edges over his skin, into his skin, through his skin.

Cael tried to scream again when one lanced deeply into his stomach, his leg, his eyes. But nothing could exist in the elemental other than pure shadow. He choked as it forced its way into his mouth and pressed on his chest from the inside. He coughed, but his lungs couldn’t even struggle against the shadow’s onslaught.

 Cael lay there, suspended in the dark, unable to make even a whimper while countless needles dug into his flesh from the inside and out. Choking on a physical manifestation of the magic he had thought had been so cool just the day before.

Cael was about to die.

And he didn’t want to.

He cried, salty tears mixing with the remnants of his eyes.

:{|}:{|}:{|}:

The darkness opened up the creature in its grasp. Carefully, it inspected every cell of its organic form. It was so interesting and alive. Even in this state, it remained in constant motion. Regardless of how the darkness pressed on its weakening body, it refused to fully stop.

The blackness of the creature's blood was so different from its own form, steeped in vitality and heat as it was. It sent a dozen probes through these channels to investigate the source of this flowing energy.

It would have to work quickly. Already, the being in its grasp was beginning to slow in its constant motions. Soon it would stop and the darkness would be left unsatisfied.

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This thing was so interesting. Any piece separated from the greater whole quickly lost its color. The darkness removed one of its legs to be sure of this theory.

In an instant, it was colorless as bleached bone.

It experimentally pressed the limb back in place, but it did not reattach as easily as it had separated. Unfortunately, the organism seemed incapable of reincorporating its mass.

It was dreadfully inefficient but was so wonderfully enthralling.

The darkness paused. The hunters had caught up again. They moved closer to its position, this time having already moved to fully surround it. It was stronger than them individually, but together, they covered each other's weaknesses, making them an impossible adversary.

The archangel flapped her wings far above its amorphous form. The healer. The warrior. She was the biggest threat to its continued existence and the darkness treated her as such.

A hundred abyssal tendrils whipped through the space between them. Devouring the distance faster than even the huntress could blink. Much the same as it had last time, the whips stopped short, turned away by a blinding shield that wrapped around the archangel.

Next, the giantess bounded into the plaza. The mountain. She was followed by the drake on the opposite side. The volcano itself. Barring the archangel, the drake’s fire was the most perilous magical force it had encountered to this point. However, the human, had her magic been as dense as the others, might have succeeded in suppressing the darkness altogether. The trapper. The mage. Only her low level had allowed the darkness to slip away while they were distracted by the earth elemental it had followed into the settlement.

Where was she? The darkness turned to escape the broken plaza before the mage could fill the area with her gravity wells and spatial rifts. However, the darkness remained rooted in place. Trapped before it had even known to run. It had remained still for too long studying the creature deep within its center.

The hunters shouted to one another as the darkness inspected the bubble of warped space around itself.

Space was an energy woven through itself in a self-sustaining fabric. Like many magics, it required constant magic exertion to be forced into an unnatural state.

It found the line of control over the fabric and traced it back to the caster.

There. Behind the giantess. Behind the mountain. Out of sight behind a dozen buildings. The darkness forced a thick line of shadow into the earth below itself, sending the shadows to branch out through the stone under itself and the hunters.

Mountain shouted and dove for the mage, clearly having noticed the danger lurking below the surface. She was not moving fast enough.

A forest of black spears erupted from the ground and were halted in place. Stopped by a wall of seized space around the mage. No matter. It had succeeded in interrupting the casting.

The darkness rushed away but had only managed to move itself a short distance before a force slammed into its form.

The Warrior clenched her fist nearby, wings twitching under the strain required to lock an elemental in place. Her other hand raised above her head, a vast orb of rippling magic floated above her palm. It would be death to the darkness once fully formed.

The darkness attacked the barrier at a thousand points, another three enforced tendrils drilling into alternating points in the containment field, prodding for weaknesses. All the while, it scanned its surroundings for a route of escape.

Unexpectedly, a solution was found within its very clutches.

That curious being in its center lived yet. It was connected to the universe itself through a mysterious energy suffusing every bit of its form. The hunters too, carried similar marks on their souls, but not a single one appeared to be as… unguarded as this.

The darkness made its choice and halved the number of attacking tendrils, turning the majority of its attention toward investigating this unknown energy as quickly as it could.

It seemed to act almost as a sponge or receptacle. Even as the darkness picked apart this being, this mysterious energy picked apart the essence of the darkness it was in contact with.

Not enough to make any real effect, even if given a millennium, but its absorption effect was still present.

The darkness gambled on its success here and pressed its consciousness into the densest portion of energy, located at the core of the being. Within, it found two other configurations absorbing energy from the main flow. When it tried to inspect the more potent of the pair, however, it was rebuffed by a powerful chorus of assorted energies that pushed its consciousness back out.

It sat there dazed for a moment before it could bring itself to attempt the remaining.

A glance at the orb of brilliant death showed that it was already at its zenith.

The darkness was out of time. It collected its essence and its soul and forced them into its last remaining option.

Distantly, the darkness felt as its old body was obliterated by light, rendering the possibility of return impossible

For now.

:{|}:{|}:{|}:

Congratulations, [Pain Tolerance] has forcibly evolved into [Spirit of Darkness].

[Pain Tolerance] cannot be regained.

Cael warily eyed the System box and the surrounding figures of the Constabulary before the pain grew too strong and he passed out.