Immediately upon seeing this massive cannibal, Elias knew that he had met a challenge that would test him to the limit, and a small smile began to creep upon the edge of his lips.
Elias knew that the shocking crash he had heard before did not come from this cannibal, who seemed to be the obvious leader here, but happened deeper in the forest, and from the way the ground shook, should have come from underground.
And yet, he no longer cared about that matter; everything in him was focused on this prey. He was not like the others, and Elias could tell, and it was not about his size, although he was seven and a half feet tall, shoulders broader than two men, and skin stretched so tight over bulging muscle it gleamed like wet marble under the fading light of the sun; evening was approaching.
His black void eyes burned with a faint inner light like a cat, and Elias knew that to this man, night and day made no difference.
To further separate him from the rest, a circlet of fused vertebrae circled his skull, dripping fresh blood. This horrifying crown seemed to be newly forged, and Elias could not help but wonder at its significance.
In one massive hand, he held a greatclub fashioned from an entire tree trunk, studded with sharpened femurs and wrapped in sinew. In the other, a still-beating heart that continuously pumped out blood through his thick fingers.
Elias noticed two things at once: the first was that this giant cannibal was not a Fury Forge, and he should be at the Mist Phantom level. How could he tell? Well, silver mist was slowly surrounding him.
Elias knew Lumina was either red or blue, but it seemed that for Mist Phantom, something changed about their Lumina, as what was emerging from the pores of this giant was silvery Lumina, and they were distorting the air like heat rising from a forge.
This silver mist coiled lazily around his massive frame, glowing faintly red-orange at the edges, as if they were on the verge of combusting.
Even from about fifty paces away, Elias could taste the mist, and it was like iron and ozone, and it stung his nose, eyes, and mouth. Without his durability or recovery ability, Elias knew that he would not be able to breathe.
None of the Cannibals surrounding their leader seemed to be suffering from the presence of this mist, and Elias figured out that it must be able to pick out friend from foe. If he were at a distance and was already suffering from this, how would he be able to do anything if he stood closer to this giant?
This was the tyranny of a Mist Phantom!
Elias suddenly understood that the enormous, monstrous mother he had killed inside the Fragment was not at the Mist Phantom level; if she was, he would not have been able to even reach her side. Perhaps her powers were scattered across all her mutated children.
The second observation he made was that the beating heart that was still pumping blood did not belong to a Siphon, but was somehow related to the rose he had attached to his hip.
"What do we have here... A pretty prince from the city of storms? Where are your guards, boy? You are in a place where monsters roam," the giant spoke, and there should have been no reason for his voice to sound so cultured and commanding when he was surrounded by bodies and a moment before he was eating the leg of a man, but it did.
Elias grinned. For a short, blissful moment, the world suddenly made sense as he sensed his Title, the Good Hunter, activate inside his body. It was a weird sensation, but one Elias was rapidly recognizing as the acknowledgement of the world itself that he had found a worthy prey.
He could not understand how this worked. Perhaps the Commander may understand the mechanism behind Titles and Talents, and how they were able to change the world around him, but for now, he knew he had seen his first true prey.
Without a care in the world, this massive cannibal bit into the thigh and threw the rest aside before he stood to his full height, and Elias was able to see what had been drawing his attention, and it was a half-formed altar.
The altar was a towering mound of fused craniums and spines, crowned by a single massive femur planted upright like a banner of defiance, which animal had that come from? All the bodies gathered here seemed to be for the creation of this altar, and all of this told Elias that these cannibals were not here to eat, but for something else.
Whatever he had been building was not yet complete, and Elias had a premonition that he did not want to be anywhere near this place if it became complete.
So focused on the leader that Elias senses only warned him a moment before two soft hands touched his feet, and he had to hold back his instincts to move a moment before the hands touched him, or he would have killed the small woman who had crawled through a mound of bodies and was now kneeling at his feet.
She was whispering at a feverish pace, making her words blur together, but Elias thought he recognized what she was saying... it was a prayer.
He shifted his legs away from her hands, and she looked up with one of the most complex gazes he had ever seen in his life. There was fear, hope, disbelief, pain, madness, and so much more inside them, but most of it was hope, and Elias nearly looked away, because he knew he was not here as a savior.
"I am not a god, do not pray to me," he said, "I am only here to kill. Can you point me in the right direction?"
There was slight confusion in her eyes, then that confusion transformed into understanding, and she slowly turned and pointed to the cannibals behind her.
As she turned to look back at him, Elias smiled at her, and she seemed to freeze in place. "Go into the forest, but do not go far."
Saying that, he walked past her, her figure already thrown to the back of his mind as the hunter took its place. Cold... certain... he knew that no matter how many prey were here now, when he was done, there would be none.
His mind seemed to expand to take in everything around him. Bodies lay everywhere, hundreds of men, women, and children, piled in grotesque mounds of torn limbs and splayed ribcages.
Hearts had been ripped out while still beating, and faces chewed to glistening bone. The ground was a churned swamp of mud, blood, and spilled entrails. His body already knew to watch his steps, and his surroundings blurred around him as his bare feet barely touched the blood-soaked earth, with his red hair streaming behind him like a comet tail of scarlet fire.
His attacks had been so quick and unexpected that even the cannibals who were looking at him did not expect it. From their point of view, Elias was a mere Wisp, which could be easily discerned by a Fury Forge, and perhaps if the woman before was not at the edge of madness, she would have sensed that Elias was a Wisp while she was a Level 3 Fury Forge.
However, the moment Elias attacked, all of this no longer meant anything.