Gleam - Chapter 149 (Patreon)

When faced with an Essence Eater, the best thing that one could do was stand firm and purge the vile creature from the world. Allowing fear to take root would only make the Essence Eater stronger.

But, when facing a veritable horde of the wretched monsters, there was only a single course of action that any sane person could take.

“Run!” Chance screamed, unleashing a powerful wave of Essence in a rolling wall of mist. He spun on his heel and sprinted in the opposite direction, only pausing for just long enough to make sure that both Yeo and Bella were running along beside him.

The back of Chance’s neck prickled furiously with every step, and he poured every scrap of Essence he had out and back, trying to push back the mounting terror rolling like a tidal wave behind them.

Screaming split the alleyway, tearing down the roads and echoing off the building walls. Through it all, Chance could hear the violent pounding of blood in his ears and the thump of every footstep he took on the ground.

“What the hell is that?” Yeo screamed. “Why are there so many?”

“I don’t know!” Chance yelled back, skidding as he came to the corner of the street and nearly plowing straight into the wall in his haste to keep pressing onward. “Stop wasting your breath and run!”

No matter how prepared Chance ever could have felt to face down one Essence Eater, challenging the horde behind them was such a stupid idea that not even all the luck in the universe could have changed its outcome.

The screaming grew louder as the Essence Eaters closed the distance, and the violent fear started to grow stronger. Chance’s Essence was still holding them off, but his power was draining at an alarming rate and it wouldn’t be long before they caught up.

Bella slashed her sword through the air behind her, sending a line of rippling blue energy carving out. The screaming halted for just an instant, and the trio took the very brief reprieve they’d earned to run even harder.

“Ocie!” Chance yelled, nearly tripping over his own feet as they reached an alleyway. “Let us in!”

The stone rippled, seams forming in the walls as wisps of purple smoke started to manifest themselves. The screams grew louder at a terrifying rate as the Essence Eaters rapidly approached them.

Yeo flicked his hands, sending dozens of metal threads slicing out behind them. His face was pallid and his fingers trembled, but Chance heard the wet thunks as Yeo’s magic carved into the Essence Eaters.

They devoured the magic, growing in size and lurching ever closer, but it slowed them for just a few instants. Those instants were enough for the alleyway to finish its transformation and open up a path into the Old City.

Chance shoved Bella and Yeo forward and dove after them, even as grasping snakes of black energy rocketed into the alley behind them, splitting apart and reaching out like a rapidly-growing bed of coral.

The stone slammed shut behind Chance with a resounding crash that echoed through the alley, fading into the cracked streets of the Old City. His heart pounded furiously in his chest as he scrambled to his feet, spinning to face the flat wall and breathing heavily.

Several seconds passed. None of them spoke. They all waited silently, watching to see if the Essence Eaters had any way to breach the Old City. Perhaps someone was smiling down on them, or perhaps they were just lucky, because the wall held firm.

The only thing in the alley other than them was complete and utter silence. Chance exhaled, then swallowed and ran his hand through his sweat-soaked hair as he greedily let his body draw in the breath that he’d been holding.

“That was horrible. I take every nice thing I’ve ever said about your Essence back,” Yeo rasped, sprawling out on the ground and staring up at the sky through the purple haze above them. “What did you do, kick a thousand kittens down a flight of stairs? Why did we deserve that?”

“I already told you that isn’t how it works,” Chance said wearily, but he could tell by the tone of Yeo’s voice that the other boy was well aware and had only been trying to lighten the mood.

“I never took Essence Eaters as things that hunted in packs,” Bella said. She scooted back against the wall and blew out a breath, shaking her head. “I hate those things so much. What do we do? Tell the city?”

“Something tells me that the moment we leave, they’ll be gone and the Shikari will never find them. People will just say we’re delusional – or the equivilant of it. I’m sure Pete would believe us, but I don’t know if he’d be able to do much more against a horde of Essence Eaters than we could.”

“Is there anything we could use to… I don’t know, lure them or something?” Yeo asked. “If we could fight them one at a time, I feel like we’d be able to handle it. Probably.”

“That’s reassuring,” Bella grumbled. She pushed herself to her feet and brushed the dust off her backside. “Chance, do you think you’d be able to find those things again if we leave?”

“Probably, considering we’re tied by Karma to some degree,” Chance replied. “Are you thinking of finding backup and bringing them back here?”

“Yeah. What if we got Bob and Pete, or something like that? Between them and us, I feel like we could handle the Essence Eaters pretty easily. Bob is so much stronger than we are that I feel like these would hardly be a threat to him.”

“Which makes me wonder if he’d do it in the first place,” Yeo said. “He’s a nice guy, but it’s not his job to kill the Essence Eaters. There isn’t a request out on them right now as far as I know, which means that there’s no pay for taking them out. Their bodies evaporate when they die, so we can’t even turn the corpse in. Bob has a lot of shit he’s got to do. I don’t think he’d be willing to run around Gleam all day looking for monsters that we can’t even prove exist.”

“I feel like the bigger problem is time,” Chance said, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know how long it’ll be until the thing that Yamish warned us about starts hunting. Right now, it’s in there, with the Essence Eaters. Maybe it is an Essence Eater, but I’m not going to take the bet that it’s the one we killed. I don’t know if we can afford to go all the way back, get Pete, and then come back here.”

“Ocie, maybe?” Bella asked, but Chance shook his head.

“Unfortunately not. She’s too injured already. Until I can repair her with artifacts, she shouldn’t get into any more fights. And, to be honest, I don’t know if Ocie would be enough to handle these things. They’re a huge threat to her.”

All of them fell silent again, digging through their heads in thought.

“Could you just try to use your Essence and have it guide us to what we need?” Yeo asked after a minute.

“That could very well lead us right back to the Essence Eaters, or it might lead us across the city. The thing we think we want may not necessarily be the thing we actually want. If we want to deal with the Essence Eaters, it may mean going against what the universe’s opinion on the objectively best move is.”

“Your Essence is so damn confusing,” Yeo complained. “Why can’t it just make the things you want happen, happen?”

“It would be ridiculously unfair if that was actually how it worked,” Bella said. “Karma cultivators can tweak the universe, not control it – from what I understand, at least. If Chance tried to push it into giving him what he wanted all the time, it would stop working for him.”

“Why does it almost always do what he wants, then?”

“Because I tend to just go with whatever it suggests, but I don’t know if we can leave this up to pure luck,” Chance said. “We need to handle this before those… things spread. We got brought here because the one I’m tied to is in that house, but the universe could also consider those Essence Eaters to be in the proper place. If that’s the case, we’re going against it by killing them.”

“So we shouldn’t kill them?”

“No – there’s nothing wrong with defying the universe. That’s the point of being a Cultivator,” Bella said. “It does raise an interesting point, though. Do you have to be more careful about going against what the universe wants than we do, Chance?”

Chance waggled a hand in the air. “I’ll be honest, I think everything is a lot more subjective than most people think. Good and evil seem to be heavily based on if the person committing the acts believes they’re good or evil. I mean, there’s obviously some degree of objectiveness to it, but there’s a ton of leeway. So, as long as I’m acting within the bounds of my Essence and doing what I believe to be good, the universe has no problem with the way I cultivate my Good Karma. But, if I’m trying to cultivate Good Karma and I’m doing things I think are evil…”

“You get in trouble. I’m so glad my Essence is just metal,” Yeo said with a snicker. “At least I know how it works and can explain it in less than a whole novel.”

“Says the only guy in existence that uses metal in the convoluted ass way that you do,” Bella quipped.

“I’m not the only one!”

“Only one I know. Might as well be the same thing.”

“Fair enough. I am the most important one,” Yeo admitted with false reluctance. “But that hasn’t answered the question of what we’re meant to do here. Maybe we could lure one Essence Eater into the Old City at a time?”

Chance nodded slowly. “I… think that might actually work. I’m a bit drained, so we should wait a few minutes before we try it, but that’s the best option I can think of. If we split them off and take them out one by one, we can clear out the horde and then check out what’s in that building.”

“Easy enough,” Yeo said, rubbing his hands together. “All we have to do is kill a dozen Essence Eaters. That’s easy. I kill Essence Eaters in my sleep.”

“You didn’t know what they were before today,” Bella said.

“That’s because I always killed them so fast that I never had a chance to find out what they were,” Yeo said, thrusting his chest out and giving them a grin full of false bravado. “Let’s go. For the universe, or whatever.”

The last sentence sounded particularly unmotivated, almost as if Yeo were reading off a poorly written script. Interestingly enough, it had the opposite effect to its dry, uninterested tone and drew a chuckle from Chance.

“Our battle cry is not going to be ‘for the universe’. I couldn’t think of a lamer one if I tried to.”

“Bah,” Yeo said. “It’s perfectly fine. If you don’t like it, come up with a better one.”

“I’ll settle for killing a few Essence Eaters instead,” Chance said, tightening his grip on his urumi. “Ready?”

“That battle cry sucks,” Yeo grumbled, walking over to stand beside Chance. Bella joined him, and the stone before them rumbled, pulling back to reveal the alley they’d just run out of.

“Let’s go,” Chance said, swallowing back his fear. “I’ve always wanted to be bait.”

“Really?” Yeo asked.

“No.”